The Delius Society Journal Autumn 2016, Number 160

The Delius Society (Registered Charity No 298662)

President Lionel Carley BA, PhD

Vice Presidents Roger Buckley Sir Andrew Davis CBE Sir Mark Elder CBE Bo Holten RaD Piers Lane AO, Hon DMus Martin Lee-Browne CBE David Lloyd-Jones BA, FGSM, Hon DMus FRCM Anthony Payne

Website: delius.org.uk

ISSN-0306-0373 THE DELIUS SOCIETY

Chairman Position vacant

Treasurer Jim Beavis 70 Aylesford Avenue, Beckenham, Kent BR3 3SD Email: [email protected]

Membership Secretary Paul Chennell 19 Moriatry Close, N7 0EF Email: [email protected]

Journal Editor Katharine Richman 15 Oldcorne Hollow, Yateley GU46 6FL Tel: 01252 861841 Email: [email protected]

Front and back covers: Delius’s house at Grez-sur-Loing Paintings by Ishihara Takujiro

The Editor has tried in good faith to contact the holders of the copyright in all material used in this Journal (other than holders of it for material which has been specifically provided by agreement with the Editor), and to obtain their permission to reproduce it. Any breaches of copyright are unintentional and regretted.

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL ...... 5 COMMITTEE NOTES...... 6 SWEDISH CONNECTIONS ...... 7 DELIUS’S NORWEGIAN AND DANISH SONGS: VEHICLES OF STYLISTIC EXPERIMENT AND CHANGE ...... 19 CHASING LATE SWALLOWS ...... 37 DELIUS, CABLE AND WEXFORD’S ...... 52 DELIUS, WHOEVER HE MAY BE ...... 61 INSPIRED BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ...... 74 100 YEARS AGO ...... 79 DELIUS’S HOUSTON CONNECTIONS ...... 81 THREE GOOD READS...... 84 BRAVING THE WEB FOR DELIUS … ...... 86 OBITUARIES ...... 89 Peter Harris (1931-2016) ...... 89 RETHINKING DELIUS – A CRITICAL SYMPOSIUM ...... 91 CONCERT REVIEWS ...... 95 A Mass of Life ...... 95 in ...... 100 Delius and Ivor Gurney ...... 103 Requiem in Cardiff ...... 104 CD REVIEWS ...... 107 A Village Romeo and Juliet ...... 107 DVD REVIEWS ...... 111 : The Great Composers ...... 111 DELIUS SOCIETY MEETING REPORTS ...... 116 British Music Society Annual Lecture ...... 116 The Delius Prize 2016...... 117 Delius in Performance ...... 120

DSJ 160 3

MISCELLANY ...... 126 A Village Romeo and Juliet ...... 126 Conferences in Grez and Torbay ...... 127 Graham Greene and Delius ...... 128 An Anthony Payne Proms Premiere ...... 128 ...... 129 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR ...... 130 FORTHCOMING EVENTS ...... 139 Delius Society London Branch ...... 139 Other Events ...... 140

4 DSJ 160

EDITORIAL

Welcome to the Autumn issue of the Journal which I am putting together whilst in Malaysia on an examining tour – a fascinating experience but sadly one that is Delius-free! This issue owes much to two Delius seminars which have been held over the spring and summer months. First we had an afternoon event on the day of the Delius Prize final, back in May, at which Professor Daniel Grimley discussed his transcription of Late Swallows (see page 37), Professor Anthony Gritten gave a paper entitled ‘Delius, whoever he may be’, and conductor Bo Holten talked about interpreting Delius. Then, in July, again the work of Daniel Grimley, there was a Symposium at the British Library entitled Rethinking Delius – a Critical Symposium at which leading scholars presented papers on a variety of topics. A review of the day is on page 91, and I am very grateful to Professors Anthony Gritten and Peter Franklin, who have kindly allowed their papers to be reproduced in these pages. Also reproduced in this edition is the text of Jeremy Dibble’s lecture on Delius’s Norwegian and Danish songs, given at the British Music Society meeting in March, which was run in association with the Delius Society. I am very grateful to Jeremy for adapting his talk, which was illustrated so well by baritone Milo Harries, so that it can be enjoyed by readers who were unable to be present. It is wonderful to have so many letters to the Editor in this issue (page 130) – it is excellent to have such ongoing lively debate so please do keep these coming in! It is also good to see that performances of Delius’s music are still being put on all over the world (listing page 140) – and not just The Walk and the Cuckoo: the , Cello Sonata and Brigg Fair all feature in forthcoming programmes. If you plan to attend any of the concerts listed and would be prepared to write a review for the Journal, do please let me know in advance. Please do keep your articles, letters, and other contributions coming in. The copy deadline for DSJ 161, to be published in March 2017, is 1st February.

Katharine Richman [email protected] Tel 01252 861841 or 07940 888508

DSJ 160 5

COMMITTEE NOTES

In place of the usual Chairman’s notes are notes from the Committee.

You will be glad to know that the Committee continues to work hard to keep the Society running, and providing members with a selection of events, the Journal and the Newsletter. Peter Watts, our very capable treasurer, gave notice several months ago that he would be retiring at the 2016 AGM and I hope that those of you who were there took the opportunity to thank him for all he has done. Whilst we will of course miss Peter, we are delighted to welcome in his place Jim Beavis, who very kindly came forward in response to a notice in a previous Journal. Jim brings a huge amount of financial experience to the role and the hand over from Peter has been very smooth. Jim has recently retired from a career as an accountant working for various public sector organisations. He tells us that his musical preferences were inspired by studying Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro for O Level Music and he soon made the natural progression to Debussy before discovering Delius and becoming a member of the Society. His main interest is, however, horse racing, having been inspired by his parents taking him to Brighton races when he was aged eleven. Jim often goes racing, has researched its history for several years, and is the author of a number of books about individual racecourses. We are very grateful indeed to Jim for taking on the Treasurer role. We are delighted, too, that Roger Buckley has agreed to remain on the Committee for another year. Roger was co-opted earlier this year, with specific responsibility for organising the Delius Prize and this year’s AGM at Madingley Hall, Cambridge. You will note that we are still without a Chairman and a Vice chairman. Whilst the Society continues to run, the Committee would be very pleased to hear from any members who may have suggestions as to how they might volunteer their help. In the meantime, any emails sent to [email protected] will be read by Paul Chennell and forwarded on as appropriate. Contact details for members of the Committee are given at the front of the Journal.

6 DSJ 160

SWEDISH CONNECTIONS

Lionel Carley, President of The Delius Society and Adviser and Hon Archivist of The Delius Trust, explores Delius’s Swedish connections.

In 1981 I was sent an article that had just been published in Expressen, a popular Swedish daily. It had been written by a member of the , Lars Forssell, a distinguished dramatist, lyricist and poet – so distinguished in fact that following his death in 2007 he had a street in named after him. Some years later, in 1988, I was asked by the then Cheltenham Literature Festival director if I would entertain at home a visiting party of Swedish poets who were to feature in that year’s festival. Among them was to be Forssell himself. The party duly came about, but the one writer I had most anticipated meeting was unwell that evening and found himself confined to his hotel room. However, poets Göran Sonnevi, Stig Larsson and Tomas Tranströmer – the latter to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011 – all came and the event was a bibulous success, enlivened for the various Swedes present by a plentiful supply of brännvin – a Swedish schnapps – and other regional delicacies. Revisiting Lars Forssell’s piece recently – and excusing its few inaccuracies – I thought it to be interesting enough to translate it. Here clearly was a considerable enthusiast for Delius’s music in a country where that music still remained little known. To illustrate the article, the paper used Ernest Procter’s 1929 painting of Delius listening to his own music at Queens Hall and furthermore added a useful list, Delius on record, with the note that most of the recordings were published by EMI.1

* * *

There is hardly any music that is more beautiful, but a curse hangs over this Delius! Some years ago there was a biographical film on TV by Ken Russell which dealt with a man suffering from the most extreme and paralysing form of syphilis and who when he needed to be moved had himself thrown over the shoulder of his rough and brawny-armed servant like a sack of potatoes.

DSJ 160 7

His name, , is nowadays almost unknown, at all events on our Scandinavian latitudes. At least I have not been able to find him in any Swedish music programme over the past ten years. Frederick Delius was in fact a composer. And the funniest thing is that at the same time as this touching film was being shown on TV, one of the people interviewed on ‘Musicfrågan’ permitted himself publicly and openly on the TV screen to claim that Delius was the greatest English composer of the 20th century. Greater than Britten, greater than Elgar, Bliss, Bax, Vaughan Williams and all the other English composers with all sorts of noble titles. Sten Broman [conductor] did not look particularly pleased. A curse hangs over Delius. He came indeed, but at the wrong time. But Duke Ellington liked him, him and Debussy. Delius believed in melos, in melody that flowed like a stream whose source no one can discover and in which song plays a part. There is hardly any music that is more beautiful than Delius’s but at times one must ask oneself, submerged in these swelling waves of luminous, undulating sound: what is it for? But in the very next moment one is seduced, helplessly seduced, inexorably drowned in the swell, in the billows, in a never-broken note – la musique fleuve. Listen to the Violin Concerto, , Double Concerto and the wonderful and, I can assure you, you are lost. In a way Delius was an amateur in its real meaning, he loved sounds, the musical flow, and cared little for sonata form, fugues and counterpoint. He roared and chuckled, he loved and hated in music. This was his language, his objective. Eric Fenby, his devoted companion and amanuensis, has told of how, during the years, the syphilitic years when they lived together, they spoke for just a quarter of an hour about music. Music had to speak for itself. The rest was idle chatter. Delius had in fact one of the strangest life stories, even for a musician. He was born in , in the north – a landscape he has described in his beautiful North Country Sketches. His father was a wealthy wool manufacturer who quickly wanted to be rid of his bizarre and brilliant offspring. So he was sent to Florida to cultivate oranges. Delius wasn’t interested in oranges, his passion was music. He let a brother look after the oranges and instead taught violin in Jacksonville and

8 DSJ 160

Danville. He returned to Europe in June 1888 and installed himself in Leipzig where he became a close friend of Christian Sinding (The Rustle of Spring man) and through him with , who after many ifs and buts succeeded in persuading his wool merchant father to allow his son to continue with music. Grieg didn’t hesitate for a moment, for by then he had heard Delius as a violinist and had heard too the Florida Suite which was completed in 1890. It had been performed at a boisterous party by an orchestra that as payment received a barrel of beer. And in those days people could drink. Delius finally landed up in a villa outside where from then on he lived until his death in 1934, tormented but wrapped up in his music, blind, handicapped, immobile, intense and hardened. His last compositions, the third Violin Sonata and a suite, Songs of Farewell, he dictated to Fenby. The entire score! Delius’s music varies in quality between banality and brilliance. But before he was laid low by his scourge he had composed a great deal: A Mass of Life with its glorious passages, a hymn to eternal life based on texts from Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra which also gives an indication of the bombastic and superhuman in his nature, the and above all A Village Romeo and Juliet based on Gottfried Keller’s famous novella. That it works perfectly in performance I was able to judge from a production in a few years ago. Scenically it was fantastic with ethereal shadows and a landscape that slipped by on a screen above the enormous stage during the orchestral interludes. Moreover just now it’s a hit in Zurich, with Gösta Winbergh as Romeo. And those great choral works, Sea-Drift, built on texts from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and an utterly ungodly Requiem for those who died in the war. During the First World War Delius lived in a cottage in the Norwegian fells, to which he had ever returned to find inspiration. He spoke fluent Norwegian and even on his deathbed he had his wife read to him aloud from Norwegian newspapers. We need melos, we need melodies and it is only to be regretted that modern composers – with a few, if rich exceptions – involve themselves in uproar and cacophony. Perhaps because they don’t know what they want or where they want to go.

DSJ 160 9

Delius wanted us to love life. Who would not join in singing one of the principal passages of his Mass dedicated to life:

Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit, Will tiefe,tiefe Ewigkeit! In Delius there is a life urge that cannot be created without great suffering. And to crown it all: in spite of the efforts of eg and , he was never much performed in his lifetime. He landed up between Debussy and Stravinsky, Bartok and Schönberg, like a sparkling flood between four twilit mountains …

* * *

What do we know about Delius and any connection he had with – a question we might well ask ourselves after reading Lars Forssell’s piece? Philip Heseltine tells us just about all that we actually know about Delius’s two visits to Sweden that were made in the summer of 1881 and the spring or summer of 1882. It is perhaps worth here offering his account of these two trips – gained, one can only imagine, from notes made by Heseltine during conversations with Delius. There is, after all, no direct account that has been left by Delius himself. Beyond what Heseltine tells us, the aspirant composer’s time spent in and in Stockholm remains lost to us. While in Sweden he apparently stayed longest in Norrköping, a town just some 85 miles southwest of Stockholm and possessing perhaps a tenth of the population of that of Delius’s native . Its textile industry had become well established by the end of the 17th century by which time it was actually Sweden’s second largest city. Just two decades before Delius arrived in Norrköping, The Imperial Gazetteer could write: ‘The environs are beautiful, and the site of the town is one of the largest in the kingdom … It is well and regularly built, has spacious and well- paved streets, and presents a cheerful and substantial appearance’. One can well imagine how the young Delius’s spirits must have soared in such an environment when compared with that of ‘dingy’ (Heseltine’s term), heavily polluted and industrial Bradford, Delius himself later referring to his home town, with some truth, as a ‘dirty hole’. Here then is Heseltine on Delius’s first encounter with Sweden:

10 DSJ 160

Industrial district in Norrköping (once known as ‘Little Manchester’) on the Motala river in the 1870s. To the left, a spinning mill, and right, a wool warehouse.

He returned [from Germany] to Bradford in the spring of 1881, but before many weeks had passed he persuaded his father to send him to Sweden on business connected with the firm. So, on June 1st, he embarked at Hull, on a steamship bound for Gothenburg. This first visit to Scandinavia was a great event in his life, and the affection he developed for these northern countries and their people – heightened by his subsequent friendship with some of their greatest men – has led him to spend some weeks of every year there since. After a few days at Gothenburg, he went to Norrköping, where business was to be transacted, and there he succeeded in getting so many orders for the firm that his father was surprised and delighted at the apparent blossoming of his commercial abilities. Owing, no doubt, to his youth and to the ingenuous charm of his personality, he was well received wherever he went, and orders poured in for the firm. When he reached Stockholm, he quite abandoned himself to enjoyment of the lovely surroundings and the gay life of the city; and what with supper- parties, excursions by land and water, picnics, impromptu concerts in the open air, and above all the entrancingly lovely summer nights, business receded far into the background, and Stockholm seemed like Paradise after dingy Bradford, with its third-rate theatre and sordid amusements. So business was completely forgotten for a while, and an extended tour in Norway, ending up at Bergen and in no way connected with the buying

DSJ 160 11

and selling of wool, was the cause of considerable friction with the family, when the truant returned to England in the autumn. But, in consideration of services indubitably rendered at Norrköping and elsewhere, he was forgiven …2 Heseltine subsequently avers that Delius returned to Scandinavia in the spring or summer of 1882: Soon afterwards, his father sent him off to Scandinavia on a second business expedition, which, from a commercial point of view, was a most dismal failure, though two months were spent very pleasantly in exploring the many beauties of the two countries.3 Heseltine further notes, shortly after this, that ‘a trip to Paris ‘on business’ in the following year [1883] proved as abortive as the second excursion to Scandinavia.’4 And in referring (above) to ‘the two countries’, he surely means Sweden and Norway again. But he says nothing further about this second visit to Scandinavia, leaving us to guess that the business side of it was conducted (this time, it appears, unsuccessfully) once more in Sweden, though just where remains in question, and that Delius perhaps then spent a few short weeks in Norway. This can only be guesswork, as no evidence has yet come down to us as to Delius’s relations with any of the wool companies in Sweden with which he was in contact. It may well, however, be supposed that Delius, fluent in both English and German, made an effort while on his first visit to Sweden to become acquainted with the language spoken by Swedish business colleagues and by new-found friends (and, more likely than not, girlfriends) in Norrköping. A curious, intelligent Anglo-German such as he would very quickly have become aware that English, German and Swedish were quite closely cognate and would have been keen to take steps all the more easily to communicate with those around him. Some elementary knowledge of Swedish would of course have given him a grounding with Norwegian which he was soon to master during his lengthy visits to Norway in the later 1880s. Neither Max Chop, writing his short biography of Delius during the composer’s lifetime, nor, more surprisingly, Clare Delius, whose often muddled memories of her brother’s years abroad were recorded and published shortly after his death, makes any reference to time spent by Delius in Sweden specifically. For Clare, just ‘Scandinavia’ was enough:

12 DSJ 160

When Fred … proposed that he should be sent to Scandinavia as travelling representative for the firm, my father at once consented. Never, I am convinced, did such a curious representative of woollen interests set foot on those shores. The friends and acquaintances to whom he practically limited his attention, seeing hardly anybody else, were such figures in the textile world as Ibsen and Gunnar Heiberg, for whose satirical drama he was later to write some incidental music. Never mind that no evidence has emerged that Delius met either Ibsen or Heiberg before the mid- to late-1890s; and never mind that these were Norwegian figures whose connections with the wool business in Sweden might only have had any relevance had their tailoring, by some stretch of the imagination, been effected in that country; Clare Delius throughout her book constantly sought to aggrandize her brother by linking him with the great, the good and the famous, with scant regard to accuracy. In the Delius Trust Archive we have just two short letters of purely Swedish provenance. Leonard Labatt (1838-1897), pictured right, was a highly regarded Heldentenor. Born in Stockholm, he studied both in the Swedish capital and in Paris, and sang in leading operatic roles around Europe as well as in the and Canada. Two letters from him to Delius remain, one written in German just days before Labatt was due to leave in October 1888 on a tour to North America and the second a few lines, again written in German, sometime after his return to Paris in the following spring. In the address given in both of these letters – 41 Rue Cambon, Paris – lies the clue. No 43 was the address of Delius’s uncle Theodor, friend of André Messager and other musicians, and it was here in his uncle’s home that Delius had first stayed after effectively migrating to France in May 1888. Labatt must surely have met him through the mutual connection represented by Theodor Delius and would have been interested in the fact that Delius had twice sojourned in the land of his birth – and, it seems, had turned his attention to a Swedish folksong: The Swedish song that you arranged I shall take with me and sing over there – If you would have the kindness to arrange some more I should be

DSJ 160 13

grateful to you, it might well be useful for you too, as I would advertise “Swedish Folksongs” arranged by Mr Delius – Should your time not permit you to undertake this task, please return the collection of songs to me as soon as possible, as I do need it – Had Delius made his arrangement of this unspecified folksong much earlier, perhaps when he was in Sweden? Or had Labatt asked him to do so, first lending him an album of Swedish folksongs? We are unlikely ever to know, as no trace of Delius’s ‘Swedish song’, as described by Labatt, has been found. We know that Delius had by this time ‘moved on’ from Sweden, his passion for Norway, its people and its culture, having now been ignited. By 1890 he had also got to know the Franco-Norwegian William Molard, whose studio get-togethers in Paris, particularly with Scandinavian composers, artists and writers, were consolidated with the support of his wife, the Swedish sculptor Ida Ericson. Both here in the rue Vercingétorix and in the little artists’ café run by Madame Charlotte Caron in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière Delius would spend time with another Swede, the great novelist and dramatist August Strindberg, pictured left – a brief but curiously interesting relationship that has been documented in the Delius biographies but that was never actually referred to by Strindberg himself in the voluminous correspondence in which he engaged while living in Paris in the mid-1890s. Both Delius and Sibelius made settings of the Swedish poet Ernst Josephson’s ‘Black Roses’ (‘Svarta Rosor’, 1884), though Delius (who used a German translation) only set the first two of the original’s three stanzas. Josephson (1851–1906), better known as a painter than as a poet, studied art in Paris through the winter of 1873-1874 and subsequently returned to live in the city from 1879 to 1888. His collection Svarta Rosor, incorporating the title poem, came out in Sweden in 1888, and a further enlarged collection Svarta Rosor och gula (Black and yellow roses) appeared in 1901. The date of Delius’s setting is uncertain, given variously as 1901 or 1908, and there is

14 DSJ 160 nothing to record how or when Delius first came to the text. So here again, as with the mysterious Swedish folksong, we have a further unsolved problem relating to Sweden, as represented by this, the composer’s only known setting of a work by a Swedish poet. By the time Delius landed happily in Grez-sur-Loing in 1896, the village’s days as a haunt of Scandinavian painters had effectively come to an end. Strindberg had been there too (and one must remember that his own reputation as a painter has grown by leaps and bounds over recent decades). Delius’s wife-to-be, the German artist Helene ‘Jelka’ Rosen, painted there during the summer, renting a house with a large and long garden that stretched down to the river. This same house that was to be the couple’s home for the rest of their lives after Jelka succeeded in buying it in 1902 had originally been rented a few years earlier by another painter- couple, the American-born Frank Chadwick and his Swedish wife Emma Löwstädt (1855-1932), pictured here in 1892. Their daughter Louise, later a young friend of the Deliuses, was actually born in what is now often referred to as the Delius house. Meanwhile, her mother Emma and the Deliuses remained on friendly, if not particularly close, terms for the rest of her life. In 1893 the Chadwicks bought and moved to the Hôtel Laurent, one of the two hotels in Grez that had harboured so many Scandinavian artists in the 1880s, transforming it into a home for themselves and their children. The other hotel, the Chevillon, continued as a pension, but by the 1970s had become very run down, until in 1987, then in a state of serious decay, it came onto the market. Appropriately enough it was saved by a Swedish industrialist, restored, and in 1994 was reopened, in the presence of Sweden’s Queen, as a Swedish foundation, ‘a guesthouse for grantees’, with apartments, studios and other workrooms for use primarily by artists and writers from Sweden and elsewhere, but in particular from the Nordic countries.

DSJ 160 15

16 DSJ 160

One such ‘grantee’ was Brazilian-born poet Guilem Rodrigues da Silva. Originally a political refugee from his native country, and now living in Lund, he arrived in Sweden in 1966. Soon mastering the Swedish language, he eventually studied at both Stockholm and Lund Universities and moved into language teaching, furthermore entering into local political work in the city of Lund. By this time, extraordinarily enough, he had begun to write poetry in Swedish, and between 1976 and 1998 published four volumes of poetry in his second language. In 2006 came a fifth, Sonat för ensam violin (Sonata for lone violin)5, including 21 poems relating to Grez- sur-Loing, and then six years later Staden I mina drömmar (The city in my dreams), with nostalgic flashbacks to his native Rio Grande. As with Forssell’s piece I thought I might perhaps offer translations of three of these poems as an end-piece to this essay – appropriately closing with the thoughts of a poet who while in Grez fell in love with Delius’s works and who told of the banks of the Loing ‘where I sit / and listen to Delius’s music’:

Night music Music is as the air I breathe my words my thoughts are rocked like a beloved child while I hear Delius sighing in these silent rooms. Delius, so many poems I have written while I listen to your music death does not succeed in erasing your memory in Grez-sur-Loing

A photo of Frederick Delius I gaze at a photo of Frederick Delius at the same time as I listen to his music he died only seventy years ago without having listened when it was played for the first time Only a few houses from here in Grez-sur-Loing he lived with his family Thomas Beecham sent the recording

DSJ 160 17

but the post never arrived before his last breath only a few houses from here I steer my way along these streets each morning I steer my way along these streets each morning each morning these streets steer my steps I walk in pure self-preservation My doctor has told me so to do While I walk I hear Delius’s music I walk past his house don’t know if I tread in his footsteps My God how good he was! If only I could be as human as him … Lionel Carley

¹ Expressen, Stockholm, Saturday 28th November 1981 ² Heseltine, Philip: Frederick Delius. London, John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd, 1923, pp8-9 3 Ibid, p10 4 Ibid, p11 5 bookLund förlag, Lund, 2006

18 DSJ 160

DELIUS’S NORWEGIAN AND DANISH SONGS: VEHICLES OF STYLISTIC EXPERIMENT AND CHANGE

What follows is the text of this year’s British Music Society Annual Lecture, given by Professor Jeremy Dibble on Sunday 13th March 2016 at the Swedenborg Hall, London.

It remains one of the most fascinating aspects of Frederick Delius that, as an ardent cosmopolitan, he enthusiastically immersed himself in the milieu of several cultures while at the same time resisting any form of nationalistic expression at a time when nationalism, and indeed musical nationalism was considered de rigueur. Delius, moreover, was clearly attracted to the idea of exoticism, or at least to cultures that were, at the end of the nineteenth century, thought of as outside the mainstream. One of these was American, and more precisely negro music from the southern United States, which, it has to be said, he got to experience for a relatively short time in the 1880s. His love affair with Scandinavia, however, was based on an extended period of almost forty years, from his first visit to Norrköping, the textile capital of Sweden, as an emissary of his father’s wool business in Bradford, to his last sojourn in 1923 when, in August, he made his celebrated journey up the mountain from their hut in Lesjaskog, Norway with Grainger, Jelka and a domestic servant to see the sunset before his sight failed. Norway, with its elemental landscape, high mountains and fjords, its clear air and extremes of daylight and darkness appealed to the young Delius, curious to imbibe new cultural experiences. It was a setting he returned to every two years, either to compose or to walk and explore. A letter to his friend (eventually to become his wife) in June 1896 encapsulates his fascination for the tranquillity of Norway’s wild environment. The letter was written, typically, from Valdres, an area of Norway that extends from the lush southern parts to the impressive 2000-metre peaks of the Jotunheimen mountain range in the north; this was among Delius’s favoured haunts to which he would return again and again: … I am living on a big farm in Valders, situated on the mountain side of a lovely valley and working at my opera – the air is delicious and the living excellent and before leaving I hope to have completed the 1st Act [of Koanga]. The nights are grand; light all night and the color of the

DSJ 160 19

atmosphere, the hills, the woods and the water is most beautiful. The sun sets at about 8.30 behind the mountains and the immense shadows begin to creep across the great valley at 10.30, only the tops of the hills covered with fir trees are lighted by the sun’s rays – and stand out as if in gold. Then the whole disappears in a mystic half light, a very dreamy and mysterious effect. It is light enough to read and to distinguish any detail at the other end of the valley and on the mountain tops. Only one drawback. I cannot sleep. It is quite day at 2.30 a.m. and my room has 4 windows looking out over the valley. …The result is that all thro’ the night I have a most gorgeous and wonderful sunrise effect in my room. I wake up regularly at 2.45. But one does not require quite so much sleep here – and I take a nap during the day.1 But more to the point, Norway and the wider arena of Scandinavia was in the process of a new cultural self-discovery at the close of the nineteenth century. From a period of poverty and a hard agricultural subsistence at the beginning of the century, when much of the population lived on farms or in rural villages, Norway had undergone radical change where, in embracing new industries, the cities had grown exponentially, attracting many to an urban life of greater prosperity. In turn this had spawned a desire for political independence from Sweden which, like so many cultures and polities of the late nineteenth century, was expressed in painting, literature and music. To the south, Norway’s linguistic confrère, Denmark, was not imbued with Norway’s yearning for independence, but its own sense of cultural individualism had been thrown into relief in 1864 after Prussia’s annexation of Schleswig-Holstein and fuelled a sense of nationalism marked by a change from an older romanticism to a newer movement known as the ‘Modern Breakthrough’ in which a naturalism, influenced by the literature of authors such as Flaubert and Zola, took Danish literature in a fresh direction. There is early evidence of Delius’s attraction to the music of Edvard Grieg. In his written biographical memories, he recalled loving Grieg’s music as a child and, as a young violinist in Bradford, he played movements from the composer’s Violin Sonatas, works which, in the 1880s were novel in their striking melodic and harmonic content from the Teutonic mainstream of Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms. As is clear from Lionel Carley’s Edvard Grieg in England, Grieg’s music also began to gain serious currency in London and England’s other metropolitan centres during the 1880s, especially with the (which Edward Dannreuther, Grieg’s

20 DSJ 160 fellow student in Leipzig during the early 1860s had introduced as far back as 1874), the chamber works, the piano miniatures and songs. Delius undoubtedly knew some of these works. An early song, ‘Over the Mountains High’, a translation of Bjørnsterne Bjørnson’s ‘Over de høje Fjaelle’ is dated 1885 and there are part-song settings of Bjørnson, all, it seems, written in Florida and which suggest that his interest in Norwegian literature had already been awakened, perhaps by a friendship with his Norwegian neighbour, Mrs Jutta Bell. But it was not until Delius arrived in Leipzig as a student that his devotion to the Norwegian composer crystallised. Grieg had arrived in Leipzig in September 1887 in order to take further instruction in orchestration. However, the German city, as a pedagogical centre for musical training, also attracted many young Norwegians who naturally gravitated together to form a colony of ex- patriots, either studying or residing in the Saxon capital.2 Among these were the violinists Arve Arvesen, Halfdan Jebe and Johan Halvorsen, the composer and critic Hjalmar Borgstrøm, the composer and conductor Iver Holter and the composer Christian Sinding. Sinding was six years older than Delius and had already undertaken a period of four years’ study in Leipzig with Jadassohn between 1874 and 1878. It was during this period that, having begun with the aspiration of becoming a violin virtuoso, he abandoned this in favour of composition, inspired by a love affair with Germany and its music. From 1882 Sinding began to develop a reputation as a published composer, principally with songs, piano works and chamber works such as Piano Quintet Op 5 and the String Quartet Alte Weisen. A private bursary enabled Sinding to return to Leipzig for further study in 1886 at which time he met the 24-year-old Delius, fresh from his American Wanderlust. The two became immediate friends and a correspondence ensued between them until 1905. Grieg’s relationship with Sinding was essentially one of mentor, but the arrival of Grieg in Leipzig was enormously welcome to the younger man. ‘Were you not to have come here,’ he wrote to Grieg, ‘I would probably have remained at precisely the same point I was at two years ago.’3 But Delius’s friendship was clearly of considerable importance as he also admitted to Grieg: I have so far, partly because this is probably my nature and partly because circumstances designed it so, viewed the world and my place within it with a silly, pessimistic, egotistical closed heart, not believing myself capable of winning friends and not particularly bothered about the fact

DSJ 160 21

either. As a consequence, I have only completely put my trust in just one person, someone I can really hold to through thick and thin.4 Delius’s attachment to this community of Scandinavians renewed his Wanderlust and during the summer of 1887 he spent a summer vacation in Norway, keeping a travel diary of his movements in the Uskedalen, the Hardangervidde and the Skånevik fjord. Returning to Leipzig in the autumn of that year, with his father’s ‘Sword of Damocles’ hanging over him, he renewed his Norwegian friendships, particularly with Sinding. Sinding’s regard for Delius led subsequently to an introduction to Grieg and to others such as Halvorsen,5 as the famous photograph of card-playing bears witness. As Delius recalled years later: During my stay in Leipzig I had become great friends with Christian Sinding, the Norwegian composer, and we always took our midday meal together at the Panorama Restaurant. One day on our way thither suddenly Sinding said to me: ‘There’s Mr and Mrs Grieg’, and I saw coming towards us two quite small people. Sinding knew the Griegs - already introduced. I saw a little man with a broad-brimmed hat and long hair and on his arm a little woman with hair cut quite short. I was speedily introduced. We all four then made our way to the Panorama Restaurant to have dinner. I was very proud at having made his acquaintance, for since I was a little boy I had loved his music. I had as a child always been accustomed to Mozart and Beethoven and when I first heard Grieg it was as if a breath of fresh mountain air had come to me. Grieg, learning how well I knew Norway and hearing that I had just returned from a mountain-tour, naturally took great interest in me and we soon found ourselves comparing notes of mountain trips in Jotunheimen and the Hardanger Vidder. After dinner, we all took a walk round the Promenade, Mrs Grieg going home, and every day for many months we dined together, played a rubber of whist and then took a walk round the Promenade ... Then we all returned to our separate abodes to work. I lived at 5 Harkort Str and Grieg at 8 Hertel Str. He had then just finished his c minor Violin Sonata, which had its first performance during the winter season at the Gewandhaus chamber concerts. Adolf Brodsky playing the violin and Grieg the piano. It was a beautiful performance and I was very enthusiastic, and after the concert I wrote Grieg an enthusiastic letter with my impressions, enclosing in the letter a sprig of heather which I had

22 DSJ 160

gathered on the Hardanger Vidder. Next day I was very much moved to see what a deep impression this had made upon him. We also often went to the Opera together, for ‘Nibelungen, ‘Tristan’ and ‘Meistersinger’ were constantly given and of course we never missed a performance. I was 25 then and he was a little over 40. After the opera, or wherever we had been, Grieg always took Sinding and me to a wine restaurant and gave us a nice supper and claret ..., talking a great deal and staying very late. Sometimes Johan Halvorsen, the Norwegian musician, would be of the party.6 A notable confluence of this group centred around Grieg was the Christmas Eve party of 1887 when there was much music including Delius’s early orchestral essay Norwegische Schlittenfahrt (Norwegian Sleigh Ride). Halvorsen played traditional Norwegian dances – the Hallinger and Springere – Sinding’s suite for violin, and then Nina Grieg sang first songs by Sinding and then by Grieg for whom she was well known as a remarkable interpreter and executant. The performance of distinctly Norwegian songs at the party undoubtedly left a deep and long-lasting impression on the young Delius. The Grieg songs were the Tolv melodier Op 33 of the poet Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, an exponent of Norwegian romantic nationalism and the author of lyric poems which linked directness, clarity of language, a vein of realism (especially in the distinctions between rural and urban life), a deep appreciation of nature, and elements of political rebellion. It was this that helped to define much of how Norwegian and Danish poetry developed at the end of the nineteenth century. Grieg’s choice of poets from the late 1860s – Henrik Ibsen, Andreas Munch, Holger Drachmann, John Olaf Paulsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Vilhelm Krag – had begun to reflect this with alacrity. The younger Sinding, too, notwithstanding his love of German Lieder (which included songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn), began to set the poems of Drachmann and Bjørnson from 1886, precisely at the time of his friendship with Delius, perhaps spurred on by Grieg’s new publications of Drachmann songs Rejseminder fra fjeld og fjord Op 44 (Reminiscences of the Mountains and Fjord). In a few months the happy gathering inevitably broke up. Halvorsen returned to Norway and Delius to London with the unhappy prospect of joining his father’s business or engaging in further rebellion. Grieg recalled the period as one of the happiest times of his life:

DSJ 160 23

‘When I think of how lucky I have been in my company this winter, I’m thinking mainly of Sinding, Brodsky and the admirable Hardangerviddeman [Delius], I can say without a lie that the trip has been worth it and that’s really saying something.’7 For Delius the close of his time in Leipzig – and here one should ignore his dismissive statements of his training there in his last years – was calamitous. His future was entirely uncertain and the thought of languishing in the industrial world of Bradford seemed unthinkable. As we know, the catalyst of Grieg’s visit to England, and the dinner with Julius Delius in London, proved to be one of the most pivotal moments in all of Delius’s career. A regular if modest income from his father, thanks to Grieg’s persuasive intervention, allowed Delius to embark freely on a creative existence untrammelled by the need to work for a living. In 1888 settings of Norwegian poets poured out of him and there was also a setting of Ibsen’s ‘Hochgebirgsleben’ and Paa Vidderne clearly influenced in part by Peer Gynt but also by Grieg’s own melodrama Bergliot to words by Bjørnson. Many of the songs, dedicated to Nina Grieg, and Paa Vidderne, were sent to Grieg for appraisal. He was especially delighted by the songs and intrigued that many of the poems chosen by Delius he had set himself. Of course Delius undoubtedly knew the extensive range of Grieg’s songs and it is likely that he knew many of the song settings of Halfdan Kjerulf as well. The dates of these Norwegian settings are not clear. After much vacillation between composer and publisher, two sets were eventually published – 5 Lieder (aus dem Norwegischen) in 1890 and 7 Lieder (aus dem Norwegischen) in 1892 – by the London firm of Augener. Delius’s interest in and affinity with the Norwegian and Danish languages, ones that are mutually intelligible, though having different systems of pronunciation, was probably due to the fact that he was a natural German speaker. At home in Bradford German was undoubtedly spoken domestically amongst family members. Most of the children bore Germanic names – Delius was Fritz until his father died in 1903, after which he became the anglicised ‘Frederick’ – and the atmosphere at home was German to the core.8 As North Germanic languages, both Norwegian and Danish shared much in terms of vocabulary with German, though other elements, notably verbs and word order share a greater simplicity with English, of which Delius was also a native speaker replete with accent. This clearly made Norwegian and Danish more than amenable to him, though, as John Bergsagel has

24 DSJ 160 conjectured, he probably had a facility in Norwegian which he was able to transfer to Danish – at least written Danish – but, more than likely, he required a dictionary when working with them.9 More likely it was Jelka, a women of considerable linguistic talent, who had greater fluency, and on her Delius even relied for most of his German translations, a fact evident from many of the autographs and copies in the Delius Trust Archive.10 What is demonstrable is that although Delius could write, understand and translate Norwegian and Danish, his principal contact with them, especially in the Norwegian and Danish Songs, was through the medium of German translations by Lobedanz, Passarge, von Holstein and Henzen, since these were more readily available to him than the English translations subsequently provided for marketable purposes. The 12 Norwegian songs that were published in the groups by Augener show much indebtedness to Grieg; indeed it is as if the composer, free of his pedagogical bonds at Leipzig, could barely wait to spread his new, more ambitiously harmonic wings in tribute to Grieg, the great harmonic innovator. Bjørnson’s ‘Der Schlaf’ from Five Norwegian Songs, is a splendid example of the ‘Cradle Song’ genre in a simple strophic design which Grieg often favoured; and yet the harmonic and tonal syntax of Delius’s miniature shows how far he had come in the developing of his technique in only two years since he had left the United States. The sensuous nature of the harmony, saturated with ninth, eleventh and thirteenth harmonies, both of the dominant and secondary species, already reveal an appetite for novelty. But even more striking is the design of each strophe. From the gentle undulating figures of G major at the outset, we modulate first to B minor and then, much more radically to the dominant of G flat major by way of an unexpected but typically Griegian change of direction to highlight the ‘mother’s caress’; and for the benediction which follows – ‘Schlafe so selig’ (Sleep so peacefully), Delius intensifies the sense of innocence by juxtaposing the dominant of G flat with a semi-tonal rise to the dominant of G major from which the second strophe embarks. Such touches owe much to Grieg’s harmonic and maverick imagination. Of the 12 Norwegian songs published in 1890 and 1892, eight of the poems had already been used in songs by Grieg. It is of course possible that Delius chose these independently, but it is more than likely that his knowledge of Grieg’s songs, indeed of the composer’s music as a whole, was considerable. A comparison of these settings is illuminating for

DSJ 160 25 numerous reasons. The Grieg settings provide a glimpse of stylistic elements, many of which Delius adopted, while the settings by Delius reveal not only those Griegian elements which he had assimilated but also other factors, notably those of more advanced German music such as Wagner and which would have been a topical focus for both him and the more Germanic-orientated Sinding. Let us take three examples. Grieg’s ‘Margretes Vuggesang’ from Romancer Op 15 No 1 (dates from 1864-8) in A flat major reveals an uncomplicated ternary structure of Ibsen’s three verses. There is innocence too in the simple phrasing, but Grieg’s harmony is characteristically surprising. After concluding the first verse in A flat, the second verse, with its parallel octaves (a sound Delius often embraced) moves to F major before the third verse restores the opening material. Delius’s conception is somewhat larger and more elaborate.11 The pastoral sounds of the opening D flat harmony are rapidly surrendered for an unconventional move to F major, mimicking the little Haakon’s dreams of the starry heavens; yet this move is a blind for Delius then sets his second verse in the dominant A flat, allowing a smooth return to D flat for the third verse which itself contains some beguiling chromatic progressions at its conclusion, conveying perhaps a glimpse of the mother’s anxiety as she watches over her child. Another Ibsen setting, ‘Eine Vogelweise’ [The Bird’s Story’] in Grieg’s hands (Sex Digte af Henrik Ibsen Op 25 No 6) is a remarkable mix of melody and declamation in which humour and irony are depicted. Key to Grieg’s scheme is a series of arresting modulations. The first verse, in A flat, ends quizzically with a half-close and a paused progression to enable the second verse to begin in C flat major. This heightened animation is intensified by a move to E flat, the dominant key, but with a move towards F minor, the mood changes as the lovers, having vowed never to part, say their farewells forever. The last verse then seeks to encapsulate the humour and irony of the previous verse. Beginning in A flat, Grieg gives us a series of stepwise modulations through B flat major, C major and D flat major before reaching a climax with the return of the tonic. Delius’s interpretation of Ibsen’s text is a similar quirky fantasy. The first verse passes through three keys a major third apart – F major – A – C# minor and back to F, emerging with the warbling blackbird. The second verse is couched in A minor, though Delius’s pace of modulatory change is rapid to imitate the quixotic behaviour of the lovers. The third verse, rather than returning immediately

26 DSJ 160 to the home key (as Grieg does), starts forebodingly in D minor recalling the stormy second part of verse one before the opening melody returns, not in F but in A, for Delius deftly reserves the restatement of the home key for the exultant coda. A third song uses Bjørnsen’s ‘Dulgt Kjærlighed’ [‘Verborg’ne Liebe’], a tragic, almost Heine-esque account of two lovers fated to live their lives apart unknown to others. On this occasion, the two composers’ interpretations differ markedly. Grieg’s setting from his Romancer (ældre og nyere) Op 39 No 2 is imbued with the sounds of Norwegian folk music, reminiscent indeed of Peer Gynt with its simple melody and rustic drone. Each verse is a slight variant on the one before as if to comment on the unfolding tragedy, the second verse in particular articulating the sense of heartbreak, while the conclusion to each, with its Tierce de Picardie, provides a rueful intimation. Delius’s understanding of Bjørnsen’s text on the other hand is Wagnerian, the sounds of which are palpable from the opening progressions for the piano, the prevailing chromaticism and agitation of the declamatory vocal line (especially with its falling sevenths and expressive appoggiaturas) and the telling Wagnerian thumbprint of the ‘Tristan’ chord. Delius’s passion for Wagner is reflected further in a highly original work which he wrote the year after he began his Norwegian songs. Śakuntala, originally called an ‘Indisches Schauspiel nach Kalidisa’ [An ‘Indian Play after Kalidisa’], dates from 1889. For this important work Delius turned to the poetry of the Danish playwright and poet, Holger Drachmann. Drachmann had, by the end of the 1890s, become a major figure in new European literary thinking. Though he has not achieved the international renown achieved by Hans Christian Anderson and Ibsen, Drachmann and his compatriot, Jens Peter Jacobsen, were highly esteemed, and their reputations spread after German translations of their work began to appear in the 1870s. Again it was through this channel, by means of Edmund Lobedanz’s anthology of Bjørnson and other poets,12 that Delius came to Drachmann and indeed later to Jacobsen. Both these authors were influenced initially by the radical work and publications of the Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes. Brandes had published works on modern French aesthetics, notably on realism and naturalism and he was clearly interested in rights of women, having published a translation of John Stuart Mills’s The Subjection of Women. More significant, however, was his

DSJ 160 27

Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur [Principal Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature] based on his lectures at the University of Copenhagen. These later appeared in four volumes between 1872 and 1875 and this in turn led to the even more significant publication in 1883 of Det moderne Gjennembruds Mænd [The Men of the Modern Breakthrough] which specifically included not only Jacobsen and Drachmann but also Ibsen and Bjørnson. As Bergsagel has noted,13 Drachmann and Jacobsen shifted their focus from Brandes’s concentration on naturalism to another French fascination – that of symbolism – but both were also interested in the promotion of new Danish cultural romantic nationalism. Drachmann’s most famous poem Śakuntala first appeared in his novel En Overkomplet of 1876 but was reissued as a poem in 1879 in the collection Ranker og Roser: en samling sange.14 The German translation became available in 1881, one which Delius must have seen while he was Leipzig, not least because Sinding had set the poem in his song collection of Drachmann poems Ranker og Roser Op 4 in 1886, only three years prior to Delius’s own. Śakuntala is more than song with orchestral accompaniment; it is more of an extended ‘scena’. The importance of the orchestral song as a distinctive genre was established towards the end of the nineteenth century: Wagner’s Wesendonk Lieder were undoubtedly a significant precedent, but it was in the songs of Wolf, Strauss and particularly Mahler that the genre began to develop a notable momentum. The presence of the orchestra as the accompanimental medium (rather than the piano) had numerous possibilities: the immense palette of instrumental timbres had the potential to characterise a musical gesture, to intensify realistic effect, to clarify structure and to heighten that inherent sense of polyphony between voice and accompaniment so quintessential to the late nineteenth-century organic ideology of Austro-German music. Indeed, the orchestra, as supreme agent of contrapuntal thinking, did much to accentuate the symphonic dimension of Lieder composition, and, in the case of Wolf, Mahler and Strauss, connected the concept of song directly with the techniques essayed in Wagner’s music dramas. This association was advanced even further in longer, through-composed songs and in the more rarefied genre of the ‘scena’. One suspects that Delius must have observed this possibility when he confronted the four verses of Drachmann’s poem. More importantly Drachmann’s interpretation of the Kailas drama has all the ingredients and

28 DSJ 160 artistic characteristics of Tristanesque longing, a sentiment Delius had already encountered in his ‘Længsel’ [‘Longing’] from his Five Norwegian Songs. Śakuntala, a Brahmin girl, made pregnant by King Dusyant, is his only wife to bear him a child, but deceived by his other wives, she is abandoned by him. Yet, before giving birth she returns to the court. Crucially, however, she lacks the ring which would identify her to the king because it has been lost in the river. The king therefore does not recognise her and she is rejected. Fortunately for her a fisherman finds the ring in the river where she had once bathed, and brings it to the court, enabling Dusyant and Śakuntala to be reunited once more. Drachmann witnessed Kalidasa’s Sanskrit play in Munich. He was drawn to the actress who played the role of Śakuntala, but there were also resonances of his one-time failed marriage to Vilhelmine Erichsen, the love of his youth. His years of courting her were turbulent; neither of the families approved. Drachmann left for England in the summer of 1871 during which time he wrote his book English Socialists. It was a difficult period of emotional strain, but on returning to Denmark he married Vilhelmine in November. The restless marriage only lasted four years, but afterwards Drachmann pined for Vilhelmine, especially after she married again and destroyed all the love letters and poems Drachmann had written for her.15 Hence Śakuntala expresses both a mythical and human longing, articulated at the very beginning of the poem, and the cris de cœur as refrains to each verse reinforce this sense of yearning, just as Dowson’s poem ‘’ was to do decades later. In addition to the lovesickness, the canvas of Śakuntala embodies many of those Wagnerian elements of Tristan. The expressive appoggiaturas of the opening, accompanied by the restive finger tremolandi in the strings embody that restive mood of Act II. Even the extended pedal point points to the slow-moving harmonic pace of Wagner’s music drama. Certainly that Griegian love of unexpected modulation seen in the Norwegian songs is brought to bear here in numerous ways. Having established G major at the outset, Delius appears to take us to E, but that is not the goal. Instead we shift to E flat enharmonically, and with yearning dominant ninths ‘med sød Musik’ [‘with sweet music’] the sensuous eroticism is intensified not least by the colourful nature of Delius’s wind instrumentation which owes much to the invention of the remarkable Florida Suite composed mainly at Leipzig. The second verse moves enharmonically again, to G# minor and to a bleaker, more Norwegian

DSJ 160 29 modal tone redolent of Grieg once more. But Wagnerian gestures are never far away, as is evident from the progressions which accompany the question ‘Where do my footsteps roam?’ Of course, one of the most striking elements of Śakuntala is the declamatory nature of the text, even more one might argue than the proto-Wagnerian manner of ‘Verborg’ne Liebe’ of the Norwegian songs. With the original concept of the orchestral accompaniment, and the experience of the melodrama of Paa Vidderne behind him, Delius clearly responded to the new syntax and relationship of voice and orchestra. Not only could he provide nuance, timbre and sensual texture to comment on the text but also he could explore that essential sense of polyphony central to Wagner’s instrumental concept of opera. From G# minor at the end of verse 2, the yearning motive helps to enunciate a modulation to B major (that most Tristan-esque of keys) at which point Delius introduces a thoroughly Wagnerian ‘love motive’ (which he later borrowed for the Légende for violin and orchestra) typified by its chromatic inner voice and cadential dominant thirteenth appropriately accompanying a sense of ecstasy at the recognition of Śakuntala. The Wagnerian manner is not only evident from the way in which the orchestra initiates the melodic development but it is also further accentuated by the sequential nature of the thematic treatment as Delius takes us back to E flat major and then more passionately to the dominant of G. Here Drachmann’s personal interpretation comes to the fore as the sense of physical distance is emphasised, and this sense of self-dejection and despair, despite the memory of the ‘love motive’, haunts much of the last stanza. The composition of Śakuntala was significant in the early development of Delius’s output not least because it predates his first opera, Irmelin which he began in 1890. In this work, that interesting mélange of modern German elements and the harmonic innovations of Grieg undergo further assimilation. The position, however, of Śakuntala in the wider repertoire is interesting, for as a song (or, in my view, an operatic ‘scena’) it predates the publication of Mahler’s first orchestral songs and, with the exception of Wagner’s Wesendonk songs, must be among the very first examples of late nineteenth-century orchestral songs. Delius evidently had a taste for the orchestral song as a genre, for in 1891, he produced his first orchestral song cycle, setting five poems from Tennyson’s Maud. These have yet to be recorded but, judging from the musical score, they show similar signs of the lyricism and declamation

30 DSJ 160 evinced in the Norwegian songs and Śakuntala. Other poets too, such as Shelley and Heine, drew his attention, yet the draw of both Norwegian and Danish poetry was irresistible. This was in part because in Paris he enjoyed the company of many Scandinavian artists, writers and musicians. There were visits by Sinding and the poet Krag. The household of William Molard, a civil servant married to the Swedish sculptress, Ida Ericson, acted as a magnet for the playwright Gunnar Heiberg, Strindberg (who introduced Delius to the writings of Nietzsche) and , not to mention the French painter Gaugin.16 Delius’s contact with Norway and Denmark also continued on a more or less biennial basis. In the summer of 1889 he walked in the Jotunheim mountains with Sinding and Grieg during which he sketched his overture Paa Vidderne and made the acquaintance of Bjørnson. The Norwegian Songs, Śakuntala, Paa Vidderne and Irmelin also established quintessential topoi in Delius’s personal and artistic outlook for the future. I made reference earlier to Delius’s sojourn to Norway in 1896, when he failed to sleep through the summer nights. Such occasions are today times of special recreation in Scandinavia during the warm days, the glow of the evenings and the vivid sunsets, occasions which are celebrated in Nordic poetry and in music. Such poems were undoubtedly seized upon by Delius as an expression of his love of the northern climes and the experiences of these unusual physical phenomena, notably of Paulsen’s ‘Jeg reiste en deilig Sommerkvæld’ [‘Summer Eve’], Andreas Munch’s ‘Solnedgang’ [‘Sunset’] and Drachmann’s ‘Lyse Nætter’, translated as ‘Dreamy Nights’, but really meaning the ‘easy nights’ of those longer midsummer periods of continuous daylight. Here Delius achieves his languid atmosphere through the use of the lullaby ‘charm’, the extended tonic pedal point and the persistent inclusion of the ‘added sixth’ sonority. It was this languorous sensibility which he brought to the Danish Songs written between 1896 and 1897,17 a set which, with the exception of a new setting of Drachmann’s ‘Lyse Nætter’, were all settings of Jacobsen. Rather like the Norwegian Songs and Śakuntala, Delius came to the texts through the medium of German. This was in spite of a letter he wrote to Ernest Newman in 1929 (when some of the Danish Songs were being performed as part of the Delius Festival in London) where he claimed ‘All my Danish Songs and also the Norwegian ones were first composed in their original language.’18

DSJ 160 31

As Robert Threlfall has suggested,19 Delius must have misremembered given what we know of the available German translations and his knowledge of Norwegian at the time. One cannot dismiss the possibility that by 1897 his ability to read Norwegian and Danish had not improved significantly, it is almost certain that, like later Danish texts, he came to them through the German. Delius’s Seven Danish Songs are a remarkable achievement and, I believe, a significant milestone in his development as a composer. The autograph manuscript of the Danish Songs for voice and orchestra shows different orders of the songs and also different numbers. The first conception was of five songs,20 the second of seven,21 the latter of which will be the main subject of today’s focus. The songs were also made available in versions with piano accompaniment, both of which we will hear today. As for the texts, Delius opted to publish the German and English translations (which detracted from Jacobsen’s more subtle language), Jelka providing the majority of those in German, Delius providing all the English ones. The decision to ignore the original language was made purely for commercial reasons. The first of the set of seven, ‘Silken Shoes’, demonstrates vividly just how far Delius had come in the five years since the publication of the Seven Norwegian Songs of 1892. Here the fluency of chromatic harmony is much more assured, and the vocabulary of diatonic harmonies, learned to a large extent from Grieg, is now considerably more sophisticated. The song is not long – a mere 22 bars – yet the concentration of thought reveals a steadily growing confidence and facility. The rich dominant thirteenth (with eleventh, ninth and seventh) of the two opening bars supporting Delius’s rhythmical thumbprint of a triplet on the strong beat followed by a minim is a mark of the mature composer. The presence of added sixths to simple diatonic triads is another emerging sonority, and while much of the harmony could still be said to be ‘functional’, the process of key change is now much more rapid. Indeed, at the epicentre of the song, Delius reaches F# major before recovering with impressive competence the home key of F in the space of only eight bars, all without a hint of hurried or forced modulation. The vocal line, meanwhile, is no longer shackled to traditional lyric melody, but is now a freer, elastic declamatory form, and while Delius gives some care to vocal rhythm, the meaning of the text (here one of infatuation with young feminine beauty) is conveyed more by the general

32 DSJ 160 tenor or mood of the larger musical canvas where particular words are given special nuance through their harmonies and ‘sound moments’, a feature especially enhanced by Delius’s deeply sensitive but sparing orchestration. ‘Irmelin’ looks back to Delius’s eponymous first opera in its use of Griegian modality and its fairy-tale narrative. What is more, Delius recycles the cadential music of the Vorspiel to Act I of the opera for the ‘refrain’ to each verse (‘Irmelin Rose’), elongating it with great sensual effect at the end of the song. The third song, Delius’s second setting of Drachmann’s ‘Lyse Nætter’ [‘Summer Nights’], is quite magical and unique in concept. Through-composed, Delius’s evocation of the seascape and balmy, long midsummer evenings is a series of nuanced, slowly-changing harmonies that move from E flat to the close in A flat, above which is a freely declaimed vocal line. The mood is one of transcendence with nature imbued with a longing for childhood days engendered by the kaleidoscopic richness, the sensuous post-Wagnerian harmony and the perfumous ‘added-sixth’ sonorities which initiate and conclude the song. The impressionistic style of Delius’s divided strings and pointillistic use of horns for the most affecting harmonies is irresistible, but it is more difficult to bring off in the version for voice and piano given the sustained nature of the accompaniment. The symbolism of roses forms a recurrent motive for several of the Danish Songs. ‘In the Seraglio Garden’, tinged with that sense of exoticism of Śakuntala in its evocation of minarets and Turkish towers, has at its heart the perfume of flowers, the rose as a symbol of feminine sexual prime, and the rarefied enclosed space of the Ottoman concubines. The ‘added-sixth’ sonority of ‘Summer Nights’ is equally prevalent in this song, notably in the ‘dreamy’ melodic figure which presages A Mass of Life. ‘Wine roses’, like ‘Summer Nights’, continues the theme of longing – ‘a faded day, a time gone by’. The influence of Grieg can be heard in the more strident C# minor of the opening and the return to reality at the conclusion, but the core of the song is centred around a lush A major in which the memories of summer nights are captured. Here again, Delius’s languorous added sixths are present, but even more intensely in this instance with multiple appoggiaturas (note the contour of ‘wine roses’) and modal inflections, all intended to invoke that heady sense of wine and deeply scented roses. This, as with ‘Summer Evenings’ is Delius in the first flush of his maturity.

DSJ 160 33

The penultimate song of the Danish set, ‘Through long, long years’, is an aphorism similar to that of ‘Silken Shoes’. An elegiac miniature, the song begins with a Griegian gesture in B flat, but the true goal of the song is D flat. At the close of the song, Jacobsen’s potent symbol ‘Red, red roses’ embodies the rueful remembrance of youthful pleasures set against the background of Delius’s menagerie of shifting harmonic nuances. Jacobsen’s words seem truly to have inspired Delius and throughout the Danish Songs the sensibility of longing, that quintessential feature of Weltschmerz which Delius’s music conveys with such luminosity, seems to grow in intensity and consciousness, hand in hand with a boldness to explore new harmonies and the development of a chromatic language that was personal to the composer. The last song, ‘Let springtime come’, notwithstanding the last eight bars revised by Delius in 1929, seems almost to be the most advanced song of all. While there is still some retention of a discernible tonal plan, from A major to F# major and back, the journey of Delius’s harmony is by no means traditionally functional, and the fluctuating rhythmical figures that permeate much of the song serve to heighten the modernity of its harmonic world. This sense of modernity should also include the strikingly flexible and declamatory role of the voice which is no longer trammelled by traditional notions of lyricism and repetitive melody but is instead one dictated by practices of opera, a genre, of course, which preoccupied Delius for much of the 1890s. In this sense one might argue then that the Danish Songs are no longer ‘songs’ in the traditional sense but an evolving genre, in much the way that Wolf, Mahler and Strauss were transforming the song, especially with the help of the orchestra. To conclude, Delius’s preoccupation with Norwegian and Danish literature proved to be a major stimulus to him during the 1890s, and while he did turn his attention to English and German poetry, it was the new voice of Scandinavia which excited him most with its images of nature and the ability of nature’s symbols to express the ‘still, sad music of humanity’22. In addition, the poetry of Ibsen, Bjørnson, Drachmann and Jacobsen seemed an ideal catalyst for the evolution of his style at a time when a deeper assimilation of Wagner was occurring (as is evident in his third opera Koanga) but at also a juncture where the development of his own individual harmonic palette was undergoing change at the same time as Grieg’s harmonic innovations were entering a new phase of experiment. More

34 DSJ 160 importantly, the literary and artistic world views of Drachmann and Jacobsen also encouraged him towards the literature of which would soon mesmerise him. Yet, besides the artistic, philosophical and aesthetic affinity Delius felt for Scandinavian literature, the song, and in particular the orchestral song became an ideal form in which he could experiment in miniature. The Danish Songs, and the Nietzsche songs that followed them in 1898, are essentially studies in symphonic techniques which anticipate larger works, not least and A Mass of Life – as we have seen, material from ‘In the Seraglio Garden’ even found its way into the latter work – and many of the vocal and orchestral techniques we know and appreciate in Delius’s later music can be found in embryo here. That the composer considered them important to him is surely indicated by the inclusion of some of them in two of his earliest concerts. ‘Irmelin’, ‘Summer Nights’, ‘Wine Roses’, ‘Through long, long years’ and ‘Let springtime come’ featured in his self-financed concert at St James’s Hall in London on 30th May 1899 under the baton of Alfred Hertz, the reception of which was decidedly positive: ‘there can be no doubt concerning the expressive character of several miscellaneous songs, which were rendered by Mlle Christianne Andray,’ so read the review in the Musical Times, ‘for those entitled “Through long, long years” and “On the Sea Shore” [“Summer Nights”] are remarkable for poetical conception and perfect sympathy with the text.’23 ‘Silken Shoes’ and ‘In the Seraglio Garden’ were given at the Société Nationale de Musique – a rare appearance of Delius’s music in the French capital – in a translation by William Molard on 16th March 1901, sung once again by Christianne Andray and conducted by Vincent d’Indy. It is interesting that Delius was ultimately dismissive of his talents for song in later life. That he may have retained a regard for the Danish Songs, is perhaps signalled by their revival for the Delius Festival in 1929 in London. With hindsight, however, we can now recognise the value of Delius’s songs as works of major significance in which he clearly had something original to say and which, I would argue, not only occupy an important place in late nineteenth-century British music but also the wider European repertoire.

Jeremy Dibble

DSJ 160 35

1 Letter from Fritz Delius to Jelka Rosen, 15th June [1896], Grainger Museum GM178B, p6 2 Rugstad, G, ‘Christian Sinding - Frederick Delius: a friendly counterpoint’ in Carley, L (ed), Frederick Delius: Music, Art and Literature (Ashgate: Aldershot, 1998), p103 3 Letter from Sinding to Grieg, 13th June 1888 op cit Rugstad in Carley, p104 4 Ibid, p100 5 Carley, L, Grieg and Delius: A Chronicle of their Friendship in Letters (Marion Boyers: London, 1993), p31 6 MS dictated to 7 Letter from Grieg to Frants Beyer, 24th March 1888, op cit in Carley 1993, p41 8 Delius, C, Frederick Delius: Memories of My Brother (Ivor Nicholson & Watson Ltd: London, 1935), p21ff 9 Bergsagel, J ‘Delius and Danish literature’ in Carley 1998, pp290-1 10 See in particular DT36 ff pp51-87 where copies of the Danish Songs are all in Jelka’s hand and with her German translations along with both Danish and English texts 11 An earlier rejected version of this song appears in a notebook of 1887 12 see Lobedanz, E., Ausgewählte Gedichte von B Björnson und anderen neueren nordischen Dichtern (Leipzig, 1881) 13 Bergsagel, J ‘Delius and Danish literature’ in Carley 1998, pp293-4 14 Threlfall, R, A Catalogue of the Compositions of Frederick Delius: Sources and References (Delius Trust: London, 1977), p74 15 Anderson, H, ‘Vilhelmine: The Muse of Śakuntala’, The Delius Society Journal (Spring 2000 No. 127), pp12-13 16 Lowe, R, ‘Frederick Delius and Norway’ in Redwood, C, A Delius Companion (John Calder: London, 1976), pp178-9 17 A letter to Jutta Bell of 1896 mentions that he had set five poems of Jacobsen (Threlfall 1977, p77) 18 Letter from Delius to Ernest Newman 19th August 1929 in Carley, L, Delius: A Life in Letters 1909-1934 (Scolar Press: London, 1988), p353 19 Threlfall 1977, p93 20 The order was (i) ‘Through long, long years’ [‘Red roses’], (ii) ‘Let springtime come’, (iii) ‘There was a king’ [‘Irmelin Rose’], (iv) ‘No leaflet stirs upon the silent shore’ [‘Summer Nights’ or ‘Paa Stranden’] and (v) ‘Lift on high and clink the glasses’ [‘Wine Roses’]. The title, in Jelka Delius’s handwriting, is Danish Songs. 21 In the hand of Jelka Delius the manuscript of the seven songs bears the title Seven/Danish Songs/Frederick Delius, dated 1897. The order is (i) ‘Silken Shoes’, (ii) ‘Irmelin Rose’, (iii) ‘Summer Nights’, (iv) ‘In The Seraglio Garden, (v) ‘Wine Roses’, (vi) ‘Red Roses’ [‘Through long, long years’], (vii) ‘Let springtime come’. 22 Wordsworth, W, Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13th July 1798. 23 ‘Mr Fritz Delius’, Musical Times, xl (1st July 1899), p472

36 DSJ 160

CHASING LATE SWALLOWS

Professor Daniel Grimley discusses Late Swallows, in a revised version of the lecture he gave at the seminar Delius in Performance at the on 18th May 2016.

For Byron Adams

For upper middle-class German immigrants in Victorian Britain, chamber music was an essential part of their cultural environment. It was central to their sense of Bildung.1 The remarkable range and depth of high-quality chamber music-making in Manchester and West Yorkshire during Delius’s childhood must indelibly have left its mark upon his formative encounters with the classical repertoire, even though he was never meant to pursue a professional musical career.2 Early visitors to the family home included Joseph Joachim and Charles Hallé,3 and Delius’s time at the Leipzig Conservatoire in 1886-7 coincided with Adolph Brodsky’s tenure on the teaching staff, offering further opportunities for immersion in professional chamber music performance of the highest standard. It is surprising, then, that chamber music does not comprise a larger part of Delius’s corpus: there is barely a handful of ensemble pieces listed by Lionel Carley in his work-list for the composer’s entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music, and Delius never seems to have been interested in writing extensive collections of pieces for domestic consumption in the manner of Elgar or Sibelius, despite the keen economic market for such materials. Alongside the four violin sonatas and the sonata for cello and piano, and two movements from an early quartet (1888) that Robert Threlfall published in the Complete Works, Delius’s most significant chamber composition is the String Quartet of 1916-17. Like much of Delius’s chamber music, however, the String Quartet has received relatively little critical attention, and its coverage in the Delius literature remains patchy.4 This neglect might perhaps be due to the fact that it is difficult to appraise the Quartet’s relation to Delius’s other works; compared with his songs, for example, there simply aren’t sufficient chamber works to trace Delius’s developing approach to the genre across his full working life. But recurrent reservations have also been expressed about Delius’s approach to the medium, especially the supposedly unidiomatic quality of his writing. I’d like to address some of these concerns in this essay, alongside a more detailed study of the original

DSJ 160 37 version of his slow movement, Late Swallows, from the 1916 Quartet. Delius’s chamber music, I will conclude, in fact offers particularly rich opportunities for artistic interpretation, and invites an imaginatively programmatic analytical response. But such opportunities co-exist alongside some characteristic problems of realization and performance. Delius’s interest in writing chamber music seemingly lapsed swiftly after he completed his studies in Leipzig and moved to Paris in 1887, where he focused more intensively on songs, stage works (including his first ), and orchestral music. But his interest in the medium was reignited in the 1910s, partly through his first encounters with a number of outstanding chamber musicians including the string players and (particularly) the remarkable Harrison sisters, May and Beatrice. Delius must also have been struck by the exigencies of musical life during, and in the immediate aftermath, of the First World War. Possibilities for the performance of new or unfamiliar large-scale works in the or continental Europe were inevitably limited given wartime resources, and so there may well have been an economic imperative behind Delius’s renewed concern with writing for smaller ensembles. But this compositional down-sizing also reflected a wider shift in European musical aesthetics, away from the maximalised5 large-scale visions of composers such as and (and, to a lesser extent, of course, Delius himself in A Mass of Life), toward a more streamlined and restrained idiom, anticipating the neoclassicism of the early 1920s. Delius’s turn to chamber music most obviously parallels that of both Elgar and Gabriel Fauré: composers of the same generation who were too old to play an active military role but who were nevertheless significantly moved by the outbreak of hostilities to attempt to respond creatively to the circumstances of the war.6 Delius himself was forced to leave his house in Grez-sur-Loing and evacuate to Orléans in the wake of the first German advance into France on 5th September 1914, and he provided a vivid description of the refugees and wounded servicemen that he and his wife Jelka encountered during the move in his letters to Philip Heseltine and others in October.7 Though Delius returned briefly to the village once the initial threat had been pushed back, he was persuaded to move to London in early November by Thomas Beecham. It was during this stay in England that Delius first met the Harrisons, following a Hallé concert in Manchester on 3rd December, and where he also heard

38 DSJ 160

Sammons’s ; it is not unreasonable therefore to suggest that these formative musical meetings first planted the idea of writing a string quartet in Delius’s mind. Delius returned to Grez in November the following year, via Scandinavia, and on 11th January 1916 he wrote to Percy Grainger: ‘We are so glad to be back in Grez again—our Garden was terribly neglected so we are both working in it every afternoon—No gardener is to be had—Otherwise one does not feel the war here whatever.’8 The quartet was composed in spring the same year (April-June 1916), and premiered in its original three-movement form (ie without the scherzo and with the first version of Late Swallows) at the Aeolian Hall in London on 17th November 1916. The performers were Sammons and other members of the London String Quartet (H Wynn Reeves, Harry Waldo Warner, and Charles Warwick Evans). Though Delius did not relate the score in any sense to its immediate context, unlike his Requiem, which he retrospectively dedicated to the memory of ‘young artists killed during the war’, it nevertheless makes good sense to think of the Quartet as a war work, the product of a context which lends the music an additional sense of poignancy and reflectiveness. The contemporary critical response to the Quartet’s premiere was surprisingly equivocal, especially given the enthusiasm with which some of Delius’s immediate pre-war works had been greeted. The unsigned review in The Musical Times offered an unusually detailed account of the work. ‘As might have been expected, this composition is a serious contribution to musical art’, the review began, ‘the most important, in fact, that has been heard in London during the present season.’ The remainder of the review, however, was less straightforwardly positive: The first movement is full of fine things in chord contrasts and warmth of expression, and we are conscious of the composer’s firm grip of his material. The second movement has unquestioned charm. It is entitled Late Swallows, and the direction of the composer is that it should be played ‘with slow, waving movement’. The sad, pining mood which Delius realizes so well in ‘Sea-drift’ is there. The movement seemed too long for the material. The third and last movement has great vitality and thematic interest, but on first hearing it did not leave a distinct impression.9

DSJ 160 39

This account is helpful for confirming that the Quartet was indeed premiered in its original three-movement form, and that the slow movement performed on the occasion was the preliminary version of Late Swallows (significantly, the later, more familiar version is marked ‘slow and wistfully’, rather than ‘with slow, waving movement’). Nevertheless, it may have been the Musical Times’ reservations, as well as feedback from the performers themselves, that encouraged Delius to revise the score substantially after the premiere. Delius wrote to Heseltine on 27th May 1917: ‘I have rewritten my string quartet and added a scherzo—I heard it in Paris—there was a little too much double-stopping—I think it is now good’, providing an approximate date for the revisions, although no trace of a Paris performance has survived. Almost a year later, on 15th May 1918, Heseltine would refer acidly to the quality of the Quartet’s first performance, when ‘the String Quartet was raped by that lecherous party of players in London’.10 Undeterred, Delius nevertheless asked the same ensemble (with slightly varied personnel) to give the first performance of the revised work, with the addition of a scherzo (placed second) and a new version of Late Swallows (now placed third), again at the Aeolian Hall on 1st February 1919. This is the version which has ever since been performed and recorded, and which has been regarded as definitive. As Robert Threlfall first observed, however, the manuscript sources for the original three-movement version of the quartet still survive in the British Library (in an unbound envelope labelled BL MS Mus 1745/2/5), and so a coherent idea of the original version of the work can be reassembled.11 These sources include a complete autograph draft (in ink) of the score in Delius’s hand, consisting of 38 pages (ff. 138-160), plus some sketches and rejected material in an additional bifolio (f. 161), and an incomplete preliminary pencil score (ff. 168-173), including an early draft of the original version of Late Swallows and some mysterious music for the finale in 3/4 which bears no resemblance to anything in the final versions of the Quartet (ff. 174-175). The materials also include a neat set of bound parts prepared by Jelka Rosen, with Delius’s corrections, mysteriously lacking the first

40 DSJ 160 violin part, and which show no signs of having been used in performance (there are no bowing indications or fingerings, nor any sign that the pages have been turned or handled in rehearsal). There is also a fair ink copy of the final version of the score (still dated ‘1916’ but in fact written in 1917), prepared by Delius and Jelka, and a further neat copy of the score in a separate folder (BL add MS 54402), written by a third copyist but signed by Delius and including his annotations and corrections. In spite of Threlfall’s reservations, I think it is likely that this latter source was used as the Stichvorlage when the work was first engraved, since the score has the printed mark ‘Copyright 1922 by Augener Ltd.’ Beyond the addition of the new scherzo, the most obvious differences between the two versions of the Quartet—that is, the three-movement form in which it was first heard in 1916 and its later, more familiar four- movement layout—involve the first movement and Late Swallows. In its original form, the first movement was only marginally more expansive than in its final incarnation—262 as opposed to 261 bars (in the first version there is an extra bar of music in 3/4 before b. 70, which Delius later excised as he revised the work). Though both the Musical Times and more recent commentators have suggested that the movement feels rather diffuse, it is in fact very tightly organised: the Quartet begins with a deceptive sense of amiability, in G major, and then arches through two broad expressive cycles, which work through broadly the same material in parallel. It is possible to discern elements of sonata thinking in the thematic layout: a first subject group, followed by an elaborate transition (bb. 17 and 161 in the second version), and a wistful second group (bb. 80 and 210).12 Delius omits a formal development section: a procedure that was certainly not unusual for sonata-based formal schemes.13 Rather, the passionate climax of the movement’s first, expository cycle (bb. 131-133), with its striking juxtaposition of F minor and D major triads, gives way rapidly to a brief transition which leads magically straight into the reprise (b. 145). When this climax returns, in bb. 241-243, it juxtaposes A minor and F sharp major triads, and leads to a brief codetta, ‘Very Quick’, which closes the movement in a sombre but tonally ambiguous E minor: the relative minor of the work’s opening key. In its original form, Delius placed much greater emphasis on the movement’s two climactic points of arrival by scoring the music much more thickly for the ensemble. In his revision, he thinned these textures out (presumably to make them easier to play), and also elaborated

DSJ 160 41

42 DSJ 160 the approach to the codetta. Example 1, which shows the relevant bars from the original 1916 version, indicates just how much more striking this passage would have sounded in its original form. Here, and elsewhere in both the first movement and the original version of the finale, Delius’s revisions were evidently made with a pragmatic sense of realisation, but although the texture gains greater transparency as a result, some of the music’s harmonic colour and intensity is inevitably lost. The differences between the two versions of Late Swallows are much more radical. Though the original version broadly followed the same basic rounded binary scheme as in its more familiar later form, the movement was somewhat more expansive, lasting 132 rather than 121 bars in total. The principal difference is the length of the opening section (42 versus 33 bars), completely recomposed in the final version, whereas the contrasting middle section (51 versus 54 bars) was marginally shorter in its original form. By comparison, the reprise, however, was originally only slightly longer than in the final version (39 versus 35 bars). Much more striking than these relatively subtle differences of formal proportion is the obvious re-composition of the outer sections of the movement. Listeners familiar with the eloquently lamentoso 4/4 music with which the definitive version of the movement begins will be shocked by the very different opening of the movement in its original form—a gesture that Delius sketched and reworked on several occasions. The very earliest form of the opening that survives (in Delius’s incomplete pencil continuity draft, f. 172) is striking in its homophonic texture and sequential motion (Example 2), winding sinuously around a dark chromatically inflected C minor. Delius was evidently dissatisfied with the lack of a distinctive thematic profile in this first draft, since it remained incomplete and was later abandoned. He then drafted the opening a second time, in his first complete ink score (ff. 147- 151). In this second version, the music opens in 3/2 (the same metre as the middle section), with a rising first violin figure that might poetically evoke the soaring flight of the ‘late swallows’ indicated in the movement’s title (Example 3). The slow, graceful sarabande that follows is texturally simpler than the more polyphonic music of the familiar 1917 version, dominated by the first violin with a chordal accompaniment, and has a clearer sense of large-scale shape, starting pianissimo and gradually growing in amplitude toward its first forte statement in b. 24. The tonality also feels more stable: the movement opens and ultimately closes in C, rather than the modally

DSJ 160 43

44 DSJ 160 mixed D minor/major of the final version. C major is the key of the trio in the scherzo movement that was added after the Quartet’s revision, but it plays no other significant role in the work. D major, in contrast, is the tonal key of the finale, but it appears in the original version of Late Swallows only at the end of the middle section, where it is announced pianissississimo (pppp), before the music drifts back into the reprise. Here, then is another significant structural difference between the two versions of the work: in the final four-movement version of the Quartet, the third and fourth movements are tonally unified (that is, they both end in D). The work thus feels very strongly end-oriented: D major gradually emerges across the course of the two movements as the work’s ultimate tonal destination. In the 1916 version, however, the movement finishes in C, with a parting glimpse of the quaver ostinato from the middle section. D major remains more elusive, mysteriously foreshadowed only in the poignant Mahlerian codetta at the end of the middle section, with its resonant cello pizzicato figuration (Example 3). What is even more striking is the way in which this passage then gathers up the F minor-D major juxtaposition from the initial climax in the first movement (compare bb. 89-91 of Example 3 with bb. 131- 3 in the Allegro): this passage makes little sense in the context of the 1917 version of Late Swallows, as it attempts to blend the metrical shift from the 3/2 of the middle section back into the 4/4 of the reprise. Furthermore, by returning to one of the pivotal moments of the opening Allegro and anticipating the key of the finale’s coda, the central section casts a retrospective and prospective glance across the full span of the work simultaneously. The implications of this gesture for understanding the overall shape and affect of the 1916 version suggest a particularly fine degree of structural integration. Other differences between the 1916 and 1917 versions of the middle section of Late Swallows are subtler but no less revealing. In the 1916 version, the first violin’s quaver accompaniment figure enters alone: Delius elided the introduction of the rest of the ensemble in the 1917 revision, so that the gesture follows on more swiftly from the end of the previous section. The earlier version allows the players slightly more time to apply their mutes, and creates a greater sense of spaciousness (though Delius adds the direction ‘not too slow’). The earlier version also sustains its first dynamic climax (rising to fortissimo at b. 52) slightly longer: there is no sudden drop in dynamic and registral level in the following bar as in the

DSJ 160 45

46 DSJ 160

DSJ 160 47 revised version of the score. As many commentators have noted, the heart of the movement is concerned with the threefold statement of a theme derived from Delius’s earlier ‘American’ works—the ‘Florida’ suite for Orchestra and the two operas, The Magic Fountain and Koanga. This is a common feature of both 1916 and 1917 versions of the movement. As Robert Threlfall notes, the theme is associated with the pivotal dramatic moment in The Magic Fountain: the point in Act III where the European hero, Solano, and his native guide, Watawa, finally kiss in a gesture that seals their fate before they are immersed in the waters of the Fountain of Youth.14 Roger Buckley has more recently shown how the theme’s third sub-phrase is taken from a further source, ‘Frühlings Morgen’ from the 3 Symphonische Dichtungen of 1889/90: a composition otherwise unconnected with Delius’s ‘American’ music.15 But there is a further hitherto unremarked reference for this figure, drawn from the original prelude to Act III of Koanga, preserved in Delius’s autograph at Jacksonville University.16 At some point, Delius later replaced this music with a lightly adapted version of the Prelude from Act II of The Magic Fountain: music that is also recalled at the centre of his 1902 tone poem, Appalachia (between variations 7 and 8, b. 328). But in its original version, the Late Swallows theme appears in its entirety as the apex of the prelude, in the same key (G flat major) as it is stated in the Quartet. And this G flat in turn might point enharmonically to the F sharp that emerges, unexpectedly, toward the end of the first movement of the Quartet (bb. 241-243), and to the raised third degree of D major—the key to which the whole Quartet will eventually turn. Though the precise meaning of this complex network of quotation and allusion remains unclear, its integration within the broader tonal symbolism of Delius’s work is compelling. One further mystery remains: the origin and significance of the music’s evocative subtitle, Late Swallows. Delius’s penchant for poetically allusive but referentially obscure para-textual headings is well known, as is his symbolic preoccupation with bird-song (compare On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and his setting of W E Henley’s poem, A Late Lark), but I have been unable to trace any definitive literary source for Late Swallows, suggesting that it serves here as a more impressionistic impulse, evoking the end of summer, seasonal cycles, and of the transience of earthly things.17 The title is nevertheless indicated with double quotation marks, unusually for Delius, in both the preliminary score and the first version of the

48 DSJ 160 movement, implying that it was more than an incidental choice as the music began to be drafted. Among the possibilities is that the title is a reference to one of the opening lines of Charles George Douglas Roberts’ poem, ‘A Song of Regret’, from his 1886 anthology In Divers Tones: ‘In the southward sky/The late swallows fly’.18 Roberts (1860-1943) was one of the most significant figures in Canadian literature, and his work was widely anthologized,19 especially during the First World War, in which he served as a captain and later cadet trainer. Originally conceived as a patriotic hymn to the Canadian landscape, ‘A Song of Regret’, like much of Roberts’ poetry, must have gained a much sharper nostalgic edge in the context of the war and the experience of exile and loss that it entailed: ‘A sting like fire,/A desire past naming.’ Though Delius’s library has not survived, nor is there any record of his having read Roberts’ work in his correspondence, the mood and title of the poem is particularly close to the tone and spirit of Late Swallows, and to much of Delius’s music from the 1910s—not least the Requiem and the Double Concerto. As an artistic and aesthetic migrant, sitting in his garden at Grez and trying not to contemplate the physical destruction taking place just north of the French capital, the quietism of Roberts’ vision and its appeal to a lost state of innocence would surely have seemed especially urgent. And it might make Delius’s decision not to reveal his source paradoxically all the more powerful for being unspoken, even if, of course, we can never be fully sure of its origin. Chasing Late Swallows hence raises some intriguing issues of realization, interpretation and analysis. By comparing the original versions of the movement, both drafted and as performed at its 1916 premiere, with the revised version that has since become one of Delius’s best-loved pieces, we can gain greater insight into his working methods, his notational procedure, and the symbolic meaning and significance of the quartet in the context of his other war-time works. At the same time, many of the problems and questions posed by closer scrutiny of the music remain unanswered (and probably cannot be definitely resolved). This may feel interpretatively unsatisfying, and it does not necessarily support an editor trying to establish a scholarly fair text of the score with which to assist performers. But it is nevertheless testimony to the depth and complexity of Delius’s creative imagination, and to the centrality of his chamber music in the context of his later work more generally. And our understanding and appreciation of music’s role as a form of creative therapy is inevitably richer

DSJ 160 49 as a result: the legacy of war, as Delius himself surely recognized, vividly demands no less.

Daniel M Grimley

This article was completed during a period of research leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (award ref. AH/M00659X/1). For their assistance with research for this essay, I am grateful to the staff of the Music Department at the British Library, Helen Faulkner and the Delius Trust, Dr Joanna Bullivant, and the Villiers String Quartet (whose brilliant recording of the original version of Late Swallows will be issued on Naxos in early 2017). I should like to dedicate the essay to a remarkable composer and scholar, Professor Byron Adams, a true Delian.

1 See, for example, Christina Bashford, The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007) 2 Paul Seeley, ‘Fritz Delius—the Bradford Years’, Delius Society Journal, 58 (November, 1977), 5-11, at 6; Robert Threlfall, ‘Delius’s Violin Sonata (no. 1)’, The Delius Society Journal, 74 (January, 1982), 5-11 3 Clare Delius, Frederick Delius: Memories of my Brother (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1935), 47. 4 One of the most extensive discussions is in Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery, Delius and his Music (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014), 368-75. Even here, however, the verdict is equivocal: the first movement, for instance ‘rather outstays its welcome’, and ‘in general the music lacks a sense of cohesion’ (p. 370). 5 This is Richard Taruskin’s term, in the opening section of the fourth volume of The Oxford History of Western Music (New York and Oxford: , 2005), 5-6. 6 On Elgar’s chamber music and wartime, see Brian Trowell, ‘The Road to Brinkwells’, in Lewis Foreman (ed.), ‘Oh my horses!’: Elgar and the Great War (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2001), 347-385. 7 Lionel Carley (ed.) Delius: A Life in Letters, 1909-1934 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988), 137- 144. 8 Ibid, 162-3. 9 Musical Times, (December 1916, 554) 10 Barry Smith (ed.), Frederick Delius and : a Friendship Revealed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 247 and 249. Contrary to what Lee-Browne and Guinery suggest (Delius and his Music, 375), this correspondence does not confirm a performance of the Quartet on 27 May, simply that Delius had heard the revised version in Paris at some point before writing to Heseltine. 11 Robert Threlfall, Delius: A Supplementary Catalogue of Works (London: The Delius Trust, 1986), 105-7. 12 James Hepokoski’s influential theory of ‘sonata deformation’, and in particular his notion of rotational form, first developed in his analytical work on Sibelius, is especially useful here. For an accessible introduction, see his monograph, Jean Sibelius: Symphony no. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The principle of rotational form is that the music consists of series of parallel strophic statements of the same basic thematic material, often elaborated

50 DSJ 160 with aspects of developing variation and cadential goal direction. Rotational form, as Hepokoski suggests, hence operates ‘in dialogue’ with more conventional models of sonata structure, especially in symphonic music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 13 This is what Warren Darcy and James Hepokoski label a ‘Type 1 Sonata Form’ in their Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 343-350. 14 Robert Threlfall, ‘Late Swallows in Florida’, Composer, 51 (Spring 1974), 25-7. 15 Roger Buckley, ‘Recording Reviews [of Delius: Marche Caprice, Spring Morning, etc.]’, The Delius Society Journal, 135 (Spring, 2004), 61-63. 16 The manuscript source is not currently digitized, but I am grateful to Anna Large and Raymond Neal in the Carl S Swischer Library at Jacksonville University for graciously assisting my research with this score and for their kind hospitality in Florida. The published edition of Eric Fenby’s vocal score with Douglas Craig and Andrew Page’s revised libretto (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1974) reproduces pages from ’s reduction (pp. 167-9) which are broadly the same as the Jacksonville source, but the final section, featuring the Late Swallows theme, is in A flat rather than a tone lower. The orchestral version contains 4 additional bars of modulatory transition that are omitted in Schmitt’s vocal score. 17 For a similar reading, compare Trevor Hold’s analysis of On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, ‘Grieg, Delius, Grainger, and a Norwegian Cuckoo’, Tempo, New Series, 203 (Jan 1998), 11-19. 18 Charles George Douglas Roberts, In Divers Tones (Boston, Mass: D. Lothrop, 1886). Roberts was a member of the so-called ‘Confederation Poets’, and moved to Paris in 1907. After serving in the War, he joined the Canadian War Records Office in London. For a critical biography, see John Coldwell Adams, Sir Charles God Damn: the Life of Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986) 19 For instance, in the collection Poets of Our Day edited by Naomi Gladwys Royde-Smith (London: Methuen, 1908).

DSJ 160 51

DELIUS, CABLE AND WEXFORD’S KOANGA

This paper was delivered by Peter Franklin at the British Library’s Rethinking Delius – A Critical Symposium on 15th July 2016. It addresses some of the criticisms of Delius’s opera aired in the reviews of the Wexford production and report of the interview with Michael Gieleta and Stephen Barlow printed in the Spring 2016 edition of The Delius Society Journal. It arose more specifically out of the author’s engagement with Delius in Peter Franklin, Reclaiming Late- Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), pp44-52.

Can modern production contribute to the critical understanding of a ‘forgotten’ opera? Delius’s Koanga, first performed in German at Elberfeld in 1904, has always been seen as a problem piece1 – its treatment of slavery in the Deep South in the later eighteenth-century seems to have been pre- natally compromised by its composer’s instruction to a potential librettist to worry less about ‘realism’ and to go for ‘fantasy and poetry’.2 That advice has seemed to underline the opera’s susceptibility to accusations of colonialism and fashionable fin-de-siècle exoticism – of making romantically picturesque the historical oppression and brutality from which the ‘fantasy and poetry’ had been distilled. Koanga’s libretto – originally by Delius – was re-worked by Charles Keary, translated into German (and back) by Jelka, re-‘edited’ by Sir Thomas Beecham and Edward Agate in 1935 and then re-worked once again in 1972 by Douglas Craig and Andrew Page. These last, going for historical veracity, considered the published 1935 libretto ‘an […] eloquent testament to the complete ignorance of the facts, and to the fanciful conceptions that Europeans had of negro life.’3 Their libretto, containing as it does some excellent solutions, if to sometimes over-imagined problems, was used in last year’s production at Wexford, directed by Michael Gieleta. His programme-book assessment of Koanga was strikingly unlike theirs: ‘Delius’s opera and Cable’s forgotten novel [The Grandissimes] are uniquely progressive in validating the cultural, spiritual and social identity brought to the nascent American nation by enslaved Western Africans, with an insight associated with post-colonial thought. […] Delius’s opera emerges as one of the most avant-garde works of its time.’4

52 DSJ 160

One route out of this conundrum must be to reconsider that ‘forgotten’ 1880 novel by the young George Washington Cable. Delius had clearly read it (in spite of Craig and Page’s doubts about Keary5) and encouraged his intended librettist Jutta Bell to read it in 1894.6 The opera’s plot is adapted from the story, presented in chapters 28 and 29 (of 61); it recounts the subjugation, escape, torture and death of the slave ‘Bras-Coupé’ (a real historical figure who may indeed have lost an arm and about whom much more might be said7). In Cable, where he initially names himself ‘Mioko- Koanga’, the events of his story are located in the past, some eight years before those of the rest of the novel, which unfold in and just after 1803. Others of the novel’s, and that story’s, dramatis personae were certainly referred to in early versions of Delius’s libretto. His opera also alludes quite directly to the circumstances of the story’s presentation within Cable’s narrative. It is requested there by some of the young ‘Grandissimes beauties’ at the end of a family ball and party at what we might think of as a New Orleans version of a Gone with the Wind plantation-house.8 Incidentally, the teller of the story in the novel is the ‘Franco-Celtic’ Creole, Raoul Innerarity – not Delius’s old negro slave ‘Uncle Joe’ (although Raoul, a wonderfully humorous character, easily crosses social and racial boundaries and even sings an ‘old slave song’ which Cable notates musically in the novel in Chapter 27, and which Delius used in the opera – we hear it from the fields in Act I just after Palmyra has spurned Simon Perez’s advances). How much of the rest of Cable’s novel and its rather critical and even satirical ethos might also have influenced Delius’s conception? Quite a lot, I would argue. The novel’s panoramic tale of feuding old- Creole families (of Spanish, French and occasionally native-American ancestry) and the slaves they buy, exchange and mostly mistreat, often horrifies Joseph Frowenfeld – the character from whose somewhat puritanically liberal viewpoint most of the novel’s events are viewed. Negotiating the inter-familial politics of the Creole gentry, who speak either French or the kind of pigeon-English patois we might now be more likely to associate with the black slaves in Gone with the Wind, Frowenfeld happens to be an immigrant from the North, arrived in the southern state of Louisiana (newly and controversially ceded to the nascent Union). His parents had been German émigrés. Surely Fritz Delius would have had reason to sympathize with the politically cautious young Frowenfeld. As

DSJ 160 53 he sets up his apothecary business in New Orleans, he makes the acquaintance of a key surviving protagonist of Koanga’s tragic story, the quadroon Palmyre – who becomes the more operatically pronounceable ‘Palmyra’ in the Delius (she is, incidentally, described as a genetic mix of ‘high Latin ancestry’ and ‘Jaloff African’ – the race with which Koanga is associated, however in-authentically, by Cable9). Delius made Palmyra a ‘mulatto’ (half black) rather than a quadroon (a quarter black), thus arguably facilitating the choice of a black singer (as in Wexford). She must, however, develop genuine love for Koanga more convincingly than Cable’s wary Palmyre – who was no would-be operatic ingénue or delicate Mimi. She was a powerful former slave, now a respected and also feared counsellor of the black and mixed-race poor who seek her cures and use her voodoo charms and curses. She is also a beauty, a kind of femme-fatale Carmen, whose sexual power is both overwhelming and terrifying to all but the man she has always secretly loved: Honoré, the handsome Creole saviour of the Grandissimes fortune who also becomes a close friend of Joseph Frowenfeld. To cut a much longer story short10, the appalling old Agricola Fusilier buys and then sells on to Don José Martinez the striking Bras Coupé – but Martinez is unable to tame him. Fusilier recommends that the assistance be sought of his former slave Palmyre, given her presumed racial connection with the enormous Congolese (described as a proud ‘Jaloff’ tribal leader) and her knowledge of African languages. She is subsequently ‘given’ to him as a kind of gift-bride, against her will, although she comes deeply to respect and sympathize with him. In the light of this, Delius’s Palmyra could prove more complex than tradition has allowed. A more extended study of the opera would need to consider the ‘marriage’ of Palmyra and Koanga, staged as a colourful side-show to Don José’s birthday party (in Cable to the plantation-owner’s own wedding). It would similarly need to address her immediate abduction, prompted in the opera by Don José’s wife’s revelation (encouraged by the lustful Simon Perez) that Palmyra is her illegitimate sister, born a Christian and therefore an inappropriate match for a pagan. Koanga is understandably furious at the operatic abduction, but fells Martinez with a single mighty blow, as in Cable, and escapes into the swamps.11 Cable’s novel, dealing with race, class, gender and sexuality and, above all, power and its perversions in what was once considered a ‘scandalous’ manner (in the South), is far from deserving that blanket ‘ignorance of the facts’ that Craig and Page

54 DSJ 160 tendentiously attribute to Delius. There is in truth something extraordinary about that great project the composer announced to Jutta Bell in 1894, to write three works: ‘One on the Indians, one on the Gypsies and one on the Negroes and Quadroons.’12 He completed all three as The Magic Fountain, A Village Romeo and Juliet and Koanga: all feature marginalized peoples whose ‘othered’ perspective on conventional society Delius seems to adopt and sympathize with, rather in the manner of Kipling’s Kim (1901) – the story of a white boy, orphaned son of a British soldier, who perceives himself as Indian in a world where the colonizing British are in fact ‘othered’ as strange and lacking. We are ready, perhaps, to turn to the Wexford production of Koanga. How, to begin with, did it deal with the opera’s unusual cross-generic format? It was described by Delius as ‘more of an opera then the last one – with quartetts, Trios, quintettes and chorus’ (I would add that there are even relatively formal ‘entry arias’ for both Palmyra and Koanga); but the work’s over-arching formal structure also demonstrates a then modern, post-Wagnerian symphonic continuity, characterized not least by significant orchestral interludes and recurring, often lyrically generated orchestral motifs. Palmyra – sung in Wexford by the South African soprano Nozuko Teto – has an opening aria that takes the form of a scene-setting soliloquy, implicitly addressing the audience, at first without on-stage auditors. There is something of Cable’s Palmyre in her emotional complexity and strength, and her ability to mediate not just between other characters in the drama but also between us, the audience, and the on-stage world. Koanga (in Wexford, the black American baritone Norman Garrett) tends mostly to perform for an on-stage audience, or his invoked voodoo god, as in Act III; he is often specifically required in the libretto to advance to the fore-stage, as if emphasizing his ‘royal’ status as someone who expects to impress by his appearance and stance, refusing the demeaning status of ‘slave’. In fact Gieleta ignored the stylized character of Palmyra’s opening aria by soon giving her an on-stage audience: two ‘waking’ members of the chorus, all of whom were first seen entering the white-box performing area before the start of the Prologue. There they represented the end-of-evening plantation-house party-goers from whose number the named girls come forward to beg the ‘story’ from Uncle Joe. Throughout, the more or less

DSJ 160 55 uniformly white-skinned chorus members needed no unacceptable face- blacking; their dress and demeanour readily distinguished Creole masters from slaves. Delius’s lyrical orchestral underlay in the Prologue initially supports naturalistic parlando conversation and laughter that coalesces into a miniature female quartet at ‘Look how the shadows of night are falling…’; but the goal of the dramatic and musical trajectories here is clearly the overture-like orchestral interlude that follows the Prologue. Having the chorus then lie down under blankets as sleeping slaves, Gieleta did both less and more than other contemporary directors might have done (how many can suffer an orchestral interlude without movement or stage ‘business’?). Gieleta allowed Delius’s interlude to act as both a time and space machine, transporting us back to the moonlit sugar-cane fields, with the forest in the distance (the role of such interludes had been thematised by Gurnemanz in Parsifal, when he spoke of ‘time becoming space’13). As if to signal his permission to the audience to respond to the progressive, three- fold emergence of what I would call Delius’s ‘Florida’ theme (after its first brief appearance in the Florida Suite14), Gieleta lowered the lighting on James Macnamara’s set and projected onto its white walls, above the sleeping chorus, slowly-changing cloud-scapes – moon-lit and appropriately magical.

Clive Barda Photo:

56 DSJ 160

Once transported back in time into the world of the ‘opera’ proper, with Palmyra evoking the scene and expressing her conflicted feelings, we began to learn what else that white box could do. It had concealed doors, high and low, which could open to reveal economically minimal but strikingly effective glimpses of sugar cane, or tendrils of Spanish Moss in the Act III scene in the swamps. When Koanga first entered, the whole of the back wall opened from top to bottom to reveal a spectacular backdrop: the great beadwork design of Ntombephi ‘Induna’ Ntombela’s ‘My Sea. My Sister, My Tears’15, against and perhaps out of which he grandly entered, as if, indeed, from another world of mysteriously feminized Nature. The production gave no pat, pre-packaged answers to the ideological questions raised, but the staging of Delius’s ‘negro chorus’ must inevitably suggest some, whatever the colour of the singers; here the results were mixed. To my mind, both Gieleta and conductor Stephen Barlow misunderstood the first choral climax of Act I. At least one commentator (Philip Jones) has suggested that Delius hardly uses the great ‘Florida’ theme after the early parts of the first act.16 I disagree, hearing the theme as it were beneath and behind much of the opera’s music – it even erupts again triumphantly in its closing bars. That first significant choral event of Act I, where Wexford’s unconvincingly jocular, waking slaves finally come together to summon themselves with what, in 1935 at least (still daring the ‘N’ word), had been a fortissimo choral cry: ‘Come out, niggers, come out to cut the waving cane.’ Used of themselves, that now of course forbidden word might perhaps have suggested a kind of self-satirizing empowerment – in Craig and Page’s text they sing ‘O Lawd! I’m goin’ away/ And I won’t be back ’til Fall’, which is fine. Surely what matters is that they alone, the designated ‘negro chorus’, appropriate that melody from the first interlude, making it their own by adding the scotch snap in the first bar – ‘place and space’ give way to a powerful assertion of their specific being and presence within them, staking a claim upon them. With Gieleta’s chorus dancing about all over the stage, and Barlow adopting an over-fast tempo, the melody nevertheless seemed more like a frivolous allusion to the interlude. In the old Groves recording, Sir Charles surely got Delius’s point: the chorus suddenly coalesces into a body on stage, taking ownership of that melody, which they even take with them when they go off into the fields, from where we will hear them singing it off-stage. But this mostly fine and moving production succeeded on many other

DSJ 160 57 levels – for example, revealing the Act III voodoo invocation and curse by the escaped slaves in the swamps as the wonderfully terrifying thing that it is. Space constraints allow me only to consider the double ending: the first, often described as a kind of Wagnerian Liebestod, is followed by a curious Epilogue, back in the ‘present’ with Uncle Joe and the girls, who seem, however moved by his story, to think that a spring sunrise will dispel their sorrow (and all the ancient guilt of slavery?). First the conclusion of the drama of Koanga and Palmyra. Koanga’s escape at the end of Act II was awkwardly obscured in Wexford by an unnecessary piece of pull-out architecture, with a window out of which Koanga could wriggle (Delius’s lightning-illuminated glimpses of him ‘making his way through the dense forest’, with those wonderfully liberated lyrical cries to ‘Voodoo Manian’, could easily have been managed with this set). His death, however, was brutal and shattering, a final coup- de-grace shot being administered by a thug on-stage before his dying invocation of his beloved African people, praying to Voodoo that they might one day avenge him. Incidentally, the novel’s rendering of Koanga’s death also has nothing to do with any vaguely romantic ‘vision of Africa’, as suggested by William Randel and others; he is asked repeatedly, by a down-at-heel Catholic priest, eager for a convert, to tell him where he thinks he is ‘going’ in death. Koanga’s repeated, agonized, attempts to speak and the priest’s ever more attentive ear culminate not in ‘Heaven’ or ‘my Redeemer’ but a defiantly articulated ‘Africa!’17 Palmyra’s operatic suicide is similarly far from any comforting Liebestod. Her renunciation of her Christian faith and embrace of Voodoo, before she stabs herself with the dagger carried also by Cable’s Palmyre, are meant to be melodramatic acts of cultural defiance in Delius’s libretto. Craig and Page soften the 1935 version, to read ‘I renounce my Christian Faith. Accept my sacrifice, Voodoo; and remember thou the day!’ In 1935 Palmyra had cried out: ‘Christian faith, a phantom wild! Receive the blood of both, Voodoo; and remember thou the day!’ In the wonderful final Interlude that follows, Gieleta did venture a risky piece of action, which proved equal to the power of the great symphonic climax of the opera’s musical discourse, with its elaborate thematic and

58 DSJ 160 motivic links to things that have gone before, and concluding with a hushed recapitulation of the ‘Florida’ theme. Koanga and Palmyra rose slowly and walked, post-mortem, with four of the also slain black dancers, towards the beadwork ‘sea’ beneath which Koanga had first appeared.

Clive Barda Photo:

While the whole drift of the opera seems nowadays to demand that the negro chorus should become somehow visible spectators, behind and beyond the girls’ final imagined reconciliation ‘of parted lovers’ (in Craig and Page ‘of this May morning’), Gieleta did not try that, but he left one girl on stage at the end, who suddenly notices a black child standing uncertainly at the rear of the otherwise empty set; she ran to take her hand and lead her off in search of the others. It was, in its way, a moving gesture that illustrated the director’s suspicion that this was no irresponsibly exoticising, colonialist fantasy, but a powerful and very modern work indeed.

Peter Franklin

1 The most relevant modern scholarship includes William Randel’s ’Koanga and its Libretto’ (Music & Letters, Vol LII/2, April 1971, pp141-56) and his chapter ‘Delius in America’ in Christopher Redwood (ed), A Delius Companion (London: John Calder, revised edition 1980

DSJ 160 59

[originally 1976], pp147-67), Robert Threlfall’s ‘The Early History of Koanga’ in Tempo (new series, 110 (1974): pp8-11) and Eric Saylor’s ‘Race, “Realism”, and Fate in Frederick Delius’s Koanga’ (in André, Naomi with Karen M Bryan and Eric Saylor, eds, Blackness in Opera, Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012, pp78-100) 2 He was writing to Jutta Bell; see Carley, Delius: A Life in Letters I, 1862-1908 (London: Scolar Press in association with The Delius Trust, 1983), p99 3 Frederick Delius, Koanga, Vocal Score, Revised Libretto by Douglas Craig & Andrew Page (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1974), v 4 Programme-book for the 64th Wexford Festival of Opera, 21st October – 1st November 2015, p17 5 See Delius, Koanga, Vocal Score, iv, where Craig and Page state ‘It is uncertain if Keary read Cable’s book, or merely worked from the rough draft that Delius gave him.’ 6 See Carley, Delius: A Life in Letters I, p98 7 For a comprehensive historical study, see Bryan Wagner, ‘Disarmed and Dangerous: The Strange Career of Bras-Coupé’, Representations, Vol 92/1 (Fall 2005): pp117-51. Cable considers the name to refer to Koanga’s symbolic severance from his people (The Grandissimes, p171) 8 References will be to George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, with an Introduction by Michael Kreyling (Harrisonburg, Virginia: Penguin Books, 1988), here p194 (see also p167) 9 See Cable, The Grandissimes, p172ff; for Cable’s description of Palmyre, see p59 10 A significant omission here is the second character named Honoré de Grandissimes. He is the other Honoré’s half-brother, designated always by the letters ‘f m c’ [‘free man of colour’], details of whose illegitimate parentage seem to have been grafted by Delius onto his Palmyra; Honoré f m c bears a profound burden of fatalistic knowledge about his racial and social status. 11 In Cable, The Grandissimes, p180, Bras-Coupé reacts to Don José’s angrily raised hand, whereupon the latter ‘fell beneath the terrific fist of the slave, with a bang that jingled the candelabras.’ Craig and Page worry unnecessarily about Delius’s failure to provide ‘enough music to stage a fight’ (in Koanga, Vocal Score, vi); the moment is comparable to Billy’s sudden blow that fells Claggart in Britten’s Billy Budd. 12 Carley, Delius: A Life in Letters, I, p88 13 Wagner, Parsifal, Act I. Just before the famous scene-change, with its moving, painted back-drop, Gurnemanz explains to the more or less static Parsifal (who nevertheless feels himself to be in motion) ‘Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier der Zeit.’ 14 Delius, Florida Suite for Orchestra (Op posth). Full score, revised edition (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1986), Movt 3 (‘Sunset’), oboe, cue 4 15 This was produced under the aegis of the Ubuhle guild, co-founded by Ntombela and Bev Gibson in 1999 in order to pass on beadwork skills to younger people and the orphan children cared for by the guild community. 16 Philip Jones, The American Sources of Delius’s Style (New York & London: Garland, 1989 [in the series ‘Outstanding Dissertations in Music From British Universities’]), p329 17 See Randel, ‘Koanga and its Libretto’, p17 and Cable The Grandissimes, p193. Eric Saylor appears to follow Randel in ‘Race, “Realism”, and Fate in Frederick Delius’s Koanga’, p81

60 DSJ 160

DELIUS, WHOEVER HE MAY BE

This paper was delivered by Anthony Gritten at the British Library’s Rethinking Delius – A Critical Symposium on 15th July 2016. An earlier version was presented at the Seminar that preceded the Delius Prize final on 18th May 2016.

The phrase constituting my title comes from an anonymous writer in The Musical Times. A concert of British music held in Monte Carlo on 25th February 1894 received a short review in the ‘Foreign Notes’ section of the magazine, and the reviewer listed the composers as ‘Balfe, Mackenzie, Oakeley, Sullivan (“Overture di Ballo”), Parish Alvars, Godfrey (!), and one Delius, whoever he may be’.1 Balfe, Oakeley, Alvars, and Godfrey have all pretty much disappeared from musical life, while Mackenzie is mentioned now and again. Sullivan certainly remains popular within a circumscribed cultural world, with plenty of performances. Delius for his part is certainly a respected mainstream composer, but he has witnessed his star wax and wane at various times, and his music has been subjected to a somewhat chequered reception history. The work played in Monte Carlo in 1894, for example, Paa Vidderne, has yet to move to the centre ground of Delius reception. Even as we have reached in 2016 the centenary year of the Violin Concerto, the String Quartet, and the Cello Sonata, these pieces have not really been accepted as core repertoire in conservatoires and concert halls. There is, in other words, an interesting knot of issues waiting to be untied and re-united in Delius reception. This constellation includes the following: the European geography of Delius’s life abroad and his eventual interment in a Surrey cemetery; the music’s complex aesthetic relationship with Euro-Modernism; the varying degrees of Englishness attributed to his music, both in academic writing and in more normal journalistic writing; Delius’s relation to the rise of the recording industry and music publicity more generally; and his idiosyncratically Nietzschean personal views on such things as religion, life and death, the role of art (music) in modern life, and the nature of the properly artistic life. In this essay I will discuss a relatively minor topic in the reception history of Delius’s music. This is informed by my interest in the differing, and sometimes contrasted, perceptions of his music, and how these impact on the relationship between his life and art, man and music. I present some

DSJ 160 61 materials contemporaneous with Delius’s music, focusing on their juxtaposition less in terms of whether these perceptions and judgements were once true or remain true today, and more in terms of the kind of cultural work they may have been setting out to accomplish at the time and which may be felt as still active today. My case study is a minor and all but forgotten miniature from just after the end of the First World War. I begin with a comparison of two books published in 1923, both of which had a significant impact on their respective fields. These are Philip Heseltine’s Delius and George Dyson’s The New Music. Both books preceded Eric Fenby’s first proper article on Delius (1934) by more than a decade, and so had to write pretty much on their own. Obviously, Heseltine himself had known Delius well since he was a teenager, and Dyson was certainly au courant with developments, having been appointed temporary professor of composition, harmony and counterpoint at the Royal College of Music in 1923.2 Heseltine’s Delius, the first English language book-length study of the composer, remains a wonderfully perceptive assessment of the composer’s true worth. Eric Fenby described it as an ‘elegant exploratory book’.3 It is written from the perspective of a musician operating inside the composer’s charmed inner circle, is rich in evocative descriptions and comparisons, and contains a penetrating analysis of the music and its aesthetic – the spirit of Delius. Remarkably, Heseltine manages to maintain a degree of critical distance from the music and its composer, and is not afraid to criticise works or aspects of works where he feels that they fail to live up to their proper Delian potential. Published five years before Fenby entered Delius’ life, the book would make for an interesting comparison with Fenby’s Delius as I knew him, which was published after the composer’s death in 1936 as an act of exorcism. Their approaches to religious and metaphysical issues are quite different to Delius’s own proclaimed atheism or paganism, Heseltine being a little more sympathetic to the composer’s views than Fenby. Heseltine had a lot to say about Delius’s music over his short lifetime, as is clear from the collected texts in the special Heseltine issue of The Delius Society Journal,4 and his book remains a substantial and meaningful piece of work – and a rewarding read. In the final chapter of the book, titled ‘The Music Viewed as a Whole’, Heseltine writes of Delius’s gradual development of a personal style and approach to formal procedure, a process of ‘realisation, by experience and

62 DSJ 160 not in theory’. Through experience the composer came to develop ways of creating music that unfold not just formally (or better: formalistically) but organically, motif by motif, out of its initial presentation, ‘as the flower is latent in its seed’. ‘Thus’, says Heseltine, ‘through formality he [Delius] attains to form.’ In this respect, Heseltine argues that in each work Delius must work through the musical materials towards a moment of self- transcendence in order to arrive at his true style; there is a loose resonance here with the concept of ‘estrangement’ familiar from Russian Formalism, by which the world is discovered anew at a renewed perceptual level. Aside from identifying and discussing a panoply of cross-references between various scores where materials are reused, Heseltine spends much time seeking out the secret of the ‘inner vitality’ of Delius’s music. He finally locates it in a polyphony of a higher order, in a ‘division of the harmonic web into these component strands of melody which are never parallel but subtly interwoven with one another, one rising where another falls’. He summarises Delius’s musical language as governed by a Wordsworthian aesthetic of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ This is in contrast to contemporary music, which is ‘impatient, unreflective, restless and impetuous’.5 Dyson for his part wrote a number of books and a personal memoir over the course of a long and successful career. The New Music was his second book, written while he was convalescing after the First World War; his first book had been a short educational pamphlet published while he was a serving officer, with the title Grenade Warfare (1915). The New Music was well received and influential for some time, judging by critical responses to it.6 For its time, it is an admirably non-partisan study, preferring to focus on problems of artistic judgement as these are thrown up by contemporary music, and to highlight what Dyson believes to be the ‘futility of innovation which does not grow out of a living tradition’.7 As with Heseltine, Dyson turns to organicist metaphors in order to account for change both at the internal level of musical syntax and the external level of historical process. This is in contrast to, say, Constant Lambert’s Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline, published barely a decade later (1934), which is highly partisan and much more idiosyncratic, and in which Delius is mentioned several times, but only ever in passing as an example of a

DSJ 160 63 stylistic trend or a compositional approach. We might reasonably not expect to find Delius occupying centre stage in a book about ‘new’ music (even before Adorno appropriated the term ‘new’). Indeed, there is only a single score example from Delius’s music excerpted in the book, the Dance for Harpsichord (1919),8 and why this particular work might have been chosen is unclear, other than for the simple fact that its two staves made it a relatively easy target for discussion of harmony. The majority of Dyson’s score examples naturally come from Stravinsky, Debussy, Bartok, Strauss, Scriabin, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Bax, and others. In this broad artistic context, then, it is a little surprising that Dyson, who as a composer was himself more influenced by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Strauss, and Sibelius,9 should be somewhat distracted by the case of Delius at the end of his final chapter. This final essay is titled ‘The Problem of Architecture’. Dyson devotes the final four pages of the chapter to a detailed general assessment of Delius’s broader significance. Given that out of 117 music examples there is only the one from Delius, and even then not perhaps the most obvious choice, it might be suspected that there was a personal motive for Dyson’s concluding digression (though the two composers seem not to have known each other). In his discussion Dyson notes that Delius’s position in musical culture ‘is a curious one’ and that opinion remains divided about his significance. ‘He is not aggressively an innovator, yet he distinctly belongs to the modern school.’ Acknowledging that Delius ‘has no facile tricks, no seductive emotionalism, no nervous intoxication to offer’, Dyson’s most insightful perception about Delius’s music is about its rhapsodic quality. On this matter he writes that Delius’s ‘texture as such has aesthetic values of its own which may be derived neither from those of the single line nor yet from the reflected light of powerful harmonic themes.’10 Both Heseltine’s and Dyson’s books sit within a wide-ranging discourse of contemporary ideas about how to listen to music. This discourse is characterised by a distinctive moral tone: the focus is acutely on how listeners should listen to music, especially in apologia for specific composers and treatises about the ‘new’, and education and morality are consistently, deliberately, and explicitly intertwined. Within the historical context relevant to Delius, ‘whoever he may be’, and the studies by

64 DSJ 160

Heseltine and Dyson, we can turn to an article by Arthur Clutton-Brock commissioned specifically by the editor for the inaugural issue of a new magazine called Music and Letters, dated January 1920.11 Before considering Clutton-Brock’s article, however, let us conduct a fanciful little thought experiment. Suppose that you had been handed a copy of this inaugural issue, or found it lying on a coffee table in a large London house, or on the racks in your Club. What might you have made of the short piece of sheet music included at the end? This was the same short piece that Dyson quoted in his book, namely Delius’s Dance for Harpsichord, which he had composed the previous year while he and Jelka were guests of the flamboyant performer and society hostess Violet Gordon-Woodhouse. The Dance was hardly representative of Delius’s normal musical style, however that might have been understood in 1920, almost a decade before a real understanding of Delius’s significance was afforded by Beecham’s encyclopaedic composer festival of 1929. The Dance’s very instrumentation would have made for a strange listing in the composer’s catalogue. That said, given the initially wide range of articles in the new magazine dealing with all periods of music (as broadly accepted at the time), the Dance might equally have been perceived simply as nothing more than eccentric, as a representative of a recent compositional trend or as resonating with the cultural world of Arnold Dolmetsch, alongside whom Gordon-Woodhouse sometimes played. The score’s bedfellows in the new magazine made for a lovely diverse bunch, reflecting the catholic taste of the new magazine’s editor and presumably its target market: educated, keen, and with some practical facility. Thus, to mention a few of the items, there was an essay on Elgar by George Bernard Shaw (stylistically of a piece with Delius, one might think; the controversy thrown up by Shaw’s claims led to Elgar himself writing a corrective note to the magazine); an essay on church music (perhaps not the most obvious place to locate Delius’s aesthetic); a short and rather charming two-verse poem by Laurence Binyon (somewhat closer to a Delian aesthetic); part one of an extended essay on the future of English song by the well-known Irish baritone Harry Plunket Greene (Delius was not mentioned); and an essay by Gordon-Woodhouse (the dedicatee of Delius’s Dance) on ‘Old Keyed Instruments and their Music’.12 This last essay would at least have afforded the music some kind of stylistically appropriate foil. No doubt the placing of the score at the end of the inaugural issue lodged in Dyson’s mind when

DSJ 160 65 he was compiling score examples for his own book a couple of years later. Music and Letters was set up, financed and edited by Arthur Henry Fox Strangways (1859-1948), a critic from The Times. It seems that Delius was quite dismissive of Strangways’ musical judgement.13 Nevertheless, his decision to publish his piece in this new outlet, and thus his implicit subscription to its educational mission, would not have led anybody, least of the composer himself, to predict a flurry of interest in either the man or his music, especially not the Dance, however widely anticipated the new magazine might have been. Delius received a complimentary copy of Music and Letters some time before 24th March 1920, by which time he had arrived back home in Grez-sur-Loing. In fact, had Delius chosen to wait a few months and persuade the keen Heseltine to publish the Dance in another new magazine first published in May 1920, The Sackbut, the surrounding discourse encouraged by that other new magazine’s guiding lights may well have been more naturally sympathetic to Delius.14 In any case, in the following June Delius’s publisher, Universal Edition, agreed to accept the score for publication.15 Within the inaugural issue of Music and Letters, Delius’s Dance is, in terms of its instrumental genre, somewhat grotesque. Had the piano been specified at the head of the score, it would probably have come across as nothing much out of the ordinary, as just another charming piece of Delius, albeit for an instrument for which he seemed to have little genuine affinity, and for which he wrote only a handful of relatively minor pieces. As an essay in keyboard writing, the Dance may have been a catalyst for his Five Pieces and Three Preludes four years later, given the slowly growing interest in his music by performers like their dedicatee, Evlyn Howard-Jones, who would be Beecham’s favoured pianist in the 1929 Festival. As a harpsichord piece, though, the textures of the Dance are not really idiomatic, especially given that Delius seemed to be unaware of interest in the instrument from composers on the continent like De Falla and Poulenc, who would later wrote pieces for Wanda Landowska in 1923-26 and 1927-28 respectively. And yet, there is a curious resonance between the Dance and a contemporary piece of European piano music. Delius composed the piece hot on the heels of the premiere of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914- 1917), which had just been given by Marguerite Long in Paris on 11th April 1919. Delius and his wife Jelka had been staying with Gordon-Woodhouse in Belsize Gardens, NW3 since late 1918, and did not depart for Cornwall

66 DSJ 160 until the end of May / early June 1919.16 He is unlikely, then, to have known about Le Tombeau de Couperin first hand, though he would make a note of Ravel’s talent in a letter to Heseltine on 17th July.17 Delius wrote to Henry Clews in December 1918 that ‘He had listened to her [Gordon-Woodhouse] playing Bach, Scarlatti and the English composers of the 15th and 16th centuries’,18 and this adds some additional home-grown ideas about the musical style conjured up in the Dance, which we can juxtapose alongside the Ravel. The composer C W Orr wrote about meeting Delius during this period and hearing the composer play through his work-in-progress. No doubt Gordon-Woodhouse played the Dance to Delius and select others in a private premiere at her home. Its official public premiere, however, went to Evlyn Howard-Jones, who performed it on the piano,19 and he went on to play it in concert, for example in Paris on 25th January 1922,20 and to record it in 1929.21 All the more curious, then, that Delius’s Dance is as deliberately archaic and self-historicising as Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. The Dance can even be characterised as Delius’s only essay in Neoclassicism, complete with mock-Baroque ornaments, albeit something of a slightly abortive pastiche. Delius’s own pithy description, writing in The Sackbut a year later, of the period as an ‘age of anarchy in art: there is no authority, no standard, no sense of proportion’22 (Heseltine termed it ‘an age of disintegration’),23 can be used to position the Dance as an inter-war gesture of parody-cum-homage. This aligns the Dance with the work of many other composers of the time and the kinds of specially-composed scores published in special issues of magazines such as La Revue Musicale. Certainly it was unusual for Delius to hark back deliberately and unashamedly to a Baroque dance form rather than to aim for an intuitively satisfying sui generis formal shape, but the music seems not to be bothered by the aesthetic constraints imposed by the formal shaping of the phrases. This said, even with the kind of suggestive context afforded by the Ravel, all of the above historical discourse around Delius’s Dance leaves us in something of a quandary with respect to Delius, ‘whoever he may be’. Robert Montgomery and Robert Threlfall write of the years following the Dance that,

DSJ 160 67

‘With the waning of Delius’s physical powers in the 1920s a number of inevitably smaller projects were carried out, with the increasing assistance of Jelka.’24 Although I do not wish to elevate the Dance above its place within the Delian oeuvre, I am not convinced that it deserves this kind of assessment. It is not a major work, measuring by any criterion relevant to Delius (or Ravel, for that matter), or any criterion relevant to twentieth-century harpsichord composition, but on its own terms I think that it is aesthetically successful, ‘whatever it may be’, so to speak. So, in a further act of juxtaposition, and continuing to seek out aspects of Delius’s identity through his Dance, I now turn to Clutton-Brock’s essay in Music and Letters, introduced in passing above. Read in the round, this otherwise unassuming article draws together several contemporary threads, including the artistic context surrounding the books by Heseltine and Dyson. It also points outwards towards the wider world of English Belles- Lettres and the discourse of modernism and cosmopolitanism.25 Clutton-Brock (1868-1924) was a widely respected essayist and journalist of his day. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he played a major contributory role to the early success of the Times Literary Supplement, when it was founded in 1902. In 1908 Clutton-Brock became the art critic for The Times, writing prolifically for it (as the editor of Music and Letters would do later). Over the following decade he published several books, including one on Shelley (1909), an extremely widely disseminated collection of essays under the title of Thoughts on the War (1914-15), The Ultimate Belief (1916), and several miscellaneous volumes of essays on art and literature that show him to have had broad interests and deep knowledge of the history of artistic currents. It is more than likely that Dyson would have known Thoughts on the War. Clutton-Brock’s essay in Music and Letters had the disarmingly simple catch-all title, ‘On Listening to Music’. While much of the essay’s content has been long since superseded by more sophisticated empirically grounded theories in psychology and cognition, there remain some core points and underlying attitudes of mind that are worth pausing to emphasise. The essay sets out a common-sense approach to listening grounded in a Christian metaphysics, and written in a clear, easily readable prose (C S Lewis and many others readily acknowledged the influence of Clutton-Brock’s writing style on their approach to writerly

68 DSJ 160 communication).26 The essay can be interpreted as a manifesto for what the fledging magazine was setting out to accomplish in the lives of its readers: to enlighten them about important musical matters and to aid in the formation of their critical capacities, and to do so through, as the first Editorial put it, a ‘real commercium mentis et rerum – an exchange of pertinent thought’.27 Clutton-Brock begins his essay with the seemingly innocent – though in fact quite provocative – remarks that ‘no one could have less technical knowledge of music than I have and yet enjoy it’, and that ‘what I enjoy is the music itself and not ideas about it’.28 Later on he advocates listening and ‘enjoy[ing] music without such principles’.29 His approach synthesises the classical Kantian terms for aesthetic judgement with the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce.30 A recurrent motif of Clutton-Brock’s work is his focus on the proper ‘enjoyment’ of art (in this case music): what it should mean to enjoy music; how music should be enjoyed; and what music should mean when it is enjoyed properly. The term itself appears thirty-nine times in the essay’s six-and-a-half pages, and is used in ways that strongly suggest that its function is that of a surrogate for the titular term ‘listening’: to listen properly to music is to enjoy it. There is also a modernist resonance to the aesthetic ideology underpinning Clutton-Brock’s opening remarks about enjoying ‘music itself and not ideas about it’, perhaps bringing a certain kind of Stravinskyian formalism to mind; but I will bracket this issue here. Clutton-Brock’s deliberately clear-sighted and non-condescending claims about ‘enjoyment’ and listening ‘without principles’ resonate with Heseltine’s polemical foreword to the first issue of The Sackbut (issued later in the same year), which positioned that new publication as ‘a new musical journal in whose pages composers, critics, and plain men- in-the-street can meet on equal terms.’31 Clutton-Brock’s claim in Music and Letters is that whether the music is good or bad is not the point, bad music simply maintaining ‘the pretence of expression, the imitation or incitement by sound of emotions unfelt’.32 It is better simply to enjoy listening to music, to ‘let the music flow by’,33 and not to worry about the kinds of epistemological claims that listening and thinking about listening might be making. He goes on to claim, in a manner similar to Heseltine’s assessment of Delius,34 that ‘You cannot enjoy

DSJ 160 69 any kind of art without some mysticism about all art’, that music embodies a ‘transmigration of souls’.35 By this he means something like empathy or sympathy, and that the value of art is directly correlated with the intensity of delight it provides. Echoing the title of Binyon’s poem, ‘The Shyness of Beauty’, Clutton-Brock’s conclusion runs as follows: ‘that is how we ought to listen to great music, emptying the mind of all expectations and all memory of verbal descriptions, trusting in the power of the artist to fill our minds with his own beauty, which will assuredly be unlike any other.’ ‘[F]or by listening’, he argues, ‘we do attain to a kind of knowledge which is real though it lacks precision.’36 Clutton-Brock’s broad position in ‘On Listening to Music’ can be interpreted as an educated and concerned listener’s loose and baggy definition of the term ‘rhapsody’. This is a characteristically Delian term, and it is used all over the primary and secondary literature, both positively and negatively, and sometimes defensively as a means of rehabilitating Delius’s compositional technique. An extreme example from later can be read in Arthur Hutchings’s 1948 book on Delius, which went so far as to assert rather bluntly that the Violin Concerto would certainly have been a more successful work if, inter alia, its title had been Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra.37 Heseltine uses the term rhapsody liberally and frequently in his book, proposing – of rhapsody – that ‘One might almost say that the chord is to him [Delius] what the note was to the polyphonic composers, and that the melodic line is always seen in a higher dimensional aspect, so to speak, of changing chords.’38 Neville Cardus would echo this polyphonic idea twenty years later, in his conclusion that ‘There is no prose in it [Delius’s music]; it is all vibrations, vibrations of happiness, ecstasy, foreboding, pity, loneliness, resignation.’39 Dyson, too, uses the term. Like Heseltine, he concludes that Delius’s art ‘is often a rhapsodic art, but still more is it at times an art of pure contemplation. And an art of pure contemplation is not easy to practise in this twentieth century of ours.”40 In this essay I have juxtaposed some related things that were contemporaneous with Delius’s Dance for Harpsichord, and set in motion

70 DSJ 160 their various interactions. Much more could be said about, for example, the cultural significance of the fledging magazine Music and Letters; and there is some interesting work to be done on the manuscript materials for the Dance. This said, however, I hope to have at least suggested that the quirky Dance deserves another listen; that there is a wealth of detail that remains to be explored in the minutiae of the reception history of Delius’s music; and that a fuller picture of how Delius’s own contemporaries understood his music is going to require a certain amount of archaeological digging around in the broader music-related literature of the period (brilliantly modelled in Daniel Grimley’s work on the composer). Doing this might help us to make sense of certain claims, such as the following two examples of assertive ideology. First claim: in an introductory text in 1915, Heseltine wrote about ‘the almost complete absence of any other composer’s influence’ in Delius’ music.41 Second claim: in a review of the 1929 Delius Festival, the music critic of The Times, Henry Cope Colles, remarked that Delius ‘belongs to no school, follows no tradition and is like no other composer in the form, content or style of his music”.42 Notwithstanding the fact that Heseltine’s comment was penned four years before Delius composed the Dance, it seems to me that, to the extent that these kinds of claims – several others could have been cited – are still today believed to be true and ‘campaign’ free (to borrow Percy Grainger’s felicitous term),43 and to the extent that, trapped within a Romanticist ideology of genius, we insist on ignoring the curious resonances in Delius’s music with Ravel and others beyond the usual suspects, we fail to apprehend the artistic significance of Delius’s music, we lag far behind its beauty (pace Binyon: ‘her steps will be lost in the dew’), and we remain in search of ‘Delius, whoever he may be’.

Anthony Gritten

1 Anon., ‘Foreign Notes’, The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 35/614: pp266-67 (1st April 1894), pp 266-267 at p266. The exclamation mark is in the original. 2 Paul Spicer, George Dyson: His Life and Music (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014), p129 3 Eric Fenby, foreword to The Published Writings of Philip Heseltine on Delius, The Delius Society Journal 94 (Autumn 1987), p2 4 Special issue on ‘Philip Heseltine on Delius’, The Delius Society Journal 94 (Autumn 1987)

DSJ 160 71

5 Philip Heseltine, Delius (London: John Lane, 1923), quotations on respectively pp136, 136, 136, 143, Wordsworth’s Preface to his Lyrical Ballads quoted pp151, 156 6 Spicer, George Dyson, pp127-129 7 Ibid, p120 8 George Dyson, The New Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), pp66-67 9 Spicer, George Dyson, p212 10 Dyson, The New Music, quotations on respectively pp144, 145, 145, 146 11 Arthur Clutton-Brock, ‘On Listening to Music’, Music and Letters 1/1 (January 1920), pp12- 18 12 Respectively, all in Music and Letters 1/1 (January 1920): George Bernard Shaw, ‘Sir ’, pp7-11; Sydney H Nicholson, ‘Music in Country Churches’, pp27-34; Laurence Binyon, ‘The Shyness of Beauty’, p6 [sic]; Harry Plunket Greene, ‘The Future of the English Song. I. The Singer and the Public’, pp19-26; Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, ‘Old Keyed Instruments and their Music’, pp45-51 13 Letter Frederick Delius to Philip Heseltine, in Lionel Carley (ed), Delius: A Life in Letters II 1909-1934 (Aldershot: Scholar Press in association with the Delius Trust, 1988), pp229-230 14 Sarah Collins, ‘“Never out of date and never modern”: Aesthetic democracy, radical music criticism, and “The Sackbut“’, Music and Letters 95/3 (2014), pp404-428 15 Robert Montgomery & Robert Threlfall, Music and Copyright: The Case of Delius and his Publishers (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), pp156, 164, 166 n31 16 Martin Lee-Browne & Paul Guinery, Delius and his Music, pp397-398. Carley (ed), Delius: A Life in Letters II, p217 17 Letter Frederick Delius to Philip Heseltine, in Carley (ed), Delius: A Life in Letters II, p218 18 Paul Chennell, Review of Jessica Douglas-Home, Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse, in The Delius Society Journal 120 (Spring 1997), pp60-61 at p61 19 G G Hoare, ‘Delius Slept Here?’, The Delius Society Journal 54 (January 1977), pp5-9 at p9. Heseltine, Delius, p175 20 Carley (ed), Delius: A Life in Letters II, p249 21 Montgomery & Threlfall, Music and Copyright, p16 22 Frederick Delius, ‘At the Cross-Roads’, The Sackbut 1/5 (1920), pp205-208 at p206, quoted in Collins, ‘Never out of date and never modern’, p425 23 Heseltine, Delius, p156 24 Montgomery & Threlfall, Music and Copyright, p27 25 Sarah Collins, ‘The Composer as “Good European”: Musical Modernism, Amor fati and the Cosmopolitanism of Frederick Delius’, Twentieth-Century Music 12/1 (March 2015), pp97-123 26 Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J R R Tolkien, C S Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), p86 27 Arthur Henry Fox Strangways, ‘Editorial’, Music and Letters 1/1 (January 1920), pp3-5 at p4 28 Clutton-Brock, ‘On Listening to Music’, both p12 29 Ibid, p16 30 Donald J Childs, T S Eliot: Mystic, Son and Lover (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p63 31 Philip Heseltine, ‘Foreword’, The Sackbut 1/1 (1920), pp 7-8, quoted in Collins, ‘Never out of date and never modern’, p418 32 Clutton-Brock, ‘On Listening to Music’, p17 33 Ibid, p13

72 DSJ 160

34 Heseltine, Delius, pp155-156 35 Clutton-Brock, ‘On Listening to Music’, both p14 36 Ibid, respectively pp15 & 18 37 Arthur Hutchings, Delius (London: Macmillan, 1948), p93 38 Heseltine, Delius, pp139 & 140-141 39 Neville Cardus, Talking of Music (London: Collins, 1957), p178 40 Dyson, The New Music, pp146-147 41 Philip Heseltine, ‘Some Notes on Delius and his Music’, The Musical Times 56/865 (March 1915), pp137-142 at p138, quoted in Collins, ‘The Composer as “Good European”‘, p115 42 Henry Cope Colles [writing anonymously], ‘The Delius Festival: A retrospect’, The Times (2nd November 1929), p10 43 Sarah Kirby, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Percy Grainger’s construction of Frederick Delius as an American “Anglo-Saxon”’, paper at ‘Rethinking Delius: A Critical Symposium’, British Library, London, 15th July 2016

DSJ 160 73

INSPIRED BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Paul Chennell, alumnus of St Andrews University, noticed the piece below in the St Andrews Chronicle, which mentions Grez-sur-Loing. The article, poem and photograph are reproduced here with the kind permission of the University of St Andrews, Dr Emma Sutton and Lisa Ballantyne.

Senior Lecturer Dr Emma Sutton, School of English, University of St Andrews and international best-selling author Lisa Ballantyne (MA 1995, English) illustrate how the work of the Scottish writer influences both literature and music to this day.

Emma Sutton and the influence of music on Robert Louis Stevenson As Lisa Ballantyne beautifully illustrates in her poem below, Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘enduring voice’ continues to resonate across the globe. Many readers will know his work, whether through his verse for children, his iconic adventure stories, his travel writing, his debonair essays or that unsettling novel of a divided soul, Jekyll and Hyde. Some may know him as a friend and correspondent of writers including Leslie Stephen and Henry James or as the grandson of the great Scottish engineer Robert Stevenson. What is less widely known is that Stevenson was also a prolific amateur composer, writing over 140 works before his death aged 44. Stevenson described his musical interests with characteristic modesty and wit. Music was, he wrote in 1886, ‘my leading ignorance and curiosity’; after his five-hour stints at the piano neighbours were ‘packing up […] in quest of better climes’. Stevenson was a self-taught composer, studying composition manuals and playing the piano and the flageolet (a wooden precursor of the penny whistle). Although ill health prevented him from attending many concerts or operas, Stevenson honed his musical knowledge by arranging folk songs and Lieder, and by writing original compositions. Last summer, I was fortunate to follow Stevenson’s footsteps to the Pacific where he spent the last six years of his life: my chance encounter several years earlier with photographs of the ‘music corner’ of Stevenson’s home in the Pacific island of Samoa had developed into a research project on the exportation of European music to the Pacific in the nineteenth century. Stevenson, like many contemporary travellers – colonial administrators, missionaries, traders and anthropologists – took not only

74 DSJ 160 instruments but also sheet music on his travels (some of his immediate successors took gramophones and recording machines too). Music had a prominent part in his domestic life in the Pacific: the Stevenson family played the violin, piano, guitar, mandolin and clarinet together at home and at social gatherings. His wife noted that they called the house staff to daily prayers with that traditional Pacific ceremonial instrument, the pu (conch shell), noting with gleeful irreverence that hymns sounded odd sung to ‘wild and warlike’ indigenous tunes. These details suggest one of the most fascinating aspects of this transportation of European music: the two-way musical exchanges that resulted. Stevenson was not simply exporting music into a colonial context but responding to the indigenous music he heard: some of his compositions imitate the calls of native birds and the soundscape of the tropical forest – whilst their tonality is firmly European, they imitate a common Pacific aesthetic. Similarly, of course, the music of Pacific islanders was influenced by the new melodies and tonalities they heard: modern Polynesian music, for instance, is conspicuously shaped by the marching brass bands of the colonial administrators. These musical encounters played, it emerged, a significant part in Stevenson’s political beliefs and writings during this period, not least because of his friendships with members of the Hawaiian royal family, several of whom were accomplished composers. King David Kalākaua and Queen Lili‘uokalani, for example, sponsored traditional Hawaiian music and dance but also had a taste – as listeners, performers and composers – for contemporary European art music. Stevenson was appalled by the devastation of indigenous cultures wrought by the Westernisation and, ultimately, the annexation of Hawaii by the US and was an outspoken advocate of indigenous rights and self- rule. During his six years in the Pacific, he made a sustained effort to study and understand Pacific cultures and colonial politics: Stevenson visited over 40 Pacific islands, studied Pacific languages and published work on Samoan history and politics. One of the documents I encountered during this research suggests the crucial part music played in his understanding of these political and cultural tensions: the bandmaster of the Royal Hawaiian Band, Henry Berger, spent thirty years transcribing traditional Hawaiian music and poetry, a ‘mission’ catalysed by Stevenson’s advice. Stevenson, he recalled,

DSJ 160 75 had insisted on their shared ‘duty’ to ‘preserve’ this music ‘for in future [it] will be invaluable’; thousands of Berger’s manuscripts – what a contemporary called ‘a record of all the original music of the islands’ – were gifted to the state. And it was this very music that underpinned the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance – the rediscovery of almost lost traditional cultures – in the 1970s. Stevenson’s ripples indeed spread far and wide.

Robert Louis Stevenson, his family and Samoans, and the band of HMS Tauranga at Vailima, ca. 1890.

* * *

Grez-sur-Loing in France, with its famous bridge, was visited regularly by Robert Louis Stevenson, who was attracted by its established community of writers and artists. Thanks to the Scottish Book Trust’s Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, Lisa Ballantyne spent time there in the summer of

76 DSJ 160

2014. At the end of her stay she wrote the following poem, which she is delighted to share for the very first time in print with Chronicle readers.

The Nature of Influence To Robert Louis Stevenson, on a visit to Grez-sur-Loing

I read you were woken by doves and here, too, so am I.

I read in the small, worn book (size of my palm, smell of skin) written by your cousin, published seven years after you died.

This here the ninth edition, 1911, in which I found a four leaf clover pressed; its green matured inside the closed book to dark spring, potent, owning its power, a well-kept secret. Four tiny veined leaves, perfect and precious as baby’s fingernails. It is a gift from the past I have received, but I know not from whom.

The river is ever changing and yet I see it as the self-same river you called ‘pellucid’ but also ‘choked with sedge’. I have walked over cobbles the soles of your feet have tread, and now I slip into your water to swim. The current is strong and your sedge shackles my ankles.

You are everywhere here: in the sycamore seeds parched on the old stone in the poise of the gecko that listens to my thoughts in the whirr and beat of the invisible wings of aquamarine dragonflies – heard but not seen – as your enduring voice.

DSJ 160 77

The tug of the river makes my strokes stronger. I swim hard for shore, uncertain where I’ll end up.

And then, basking, skin drying, I watch bees thin as wasps work the clover. On my stomach, in the forest of short weeds I find my own: can you believe, larger and greener? I press it on the self-same page where I first found you.

Lisa Ballantyne Author of The Guilty One and Redemption Road

© University of St Andrews, Dr Emma Sutton, Lisa Ballantyne.

78 DSJ 160

100 YEARS AGO

In this regular series, Paul Chennell looks back at Delius’s letters and the writings of others to gain an insight into the composer’s activities in 1916.

Late in September 1916 Delius and Jelka spent a few days in Paris with their friends Henry and Marie Clews, after which Delius immediately started work on the Violin Concerto. In mid-November there was another excursion to their American friends, with whom they stayed for ten days. Jelka had written on 1st November to Marie: ‘Fred’s work is going so well’, an accurate summing-up of a year which ended well for her too. ‘I am painting very happily and am quite settled in my winter studio now’, she was to tell Marie on 29th December. On 14th September Percy Grainger had written to Delius enclosing publicity material he had recently had prepared, including ‘a postcard printed on your Concerto’.1 Almost three weeks later Delius replied telling Grainger he was overjoyed, and glad that Grainger had written ‘a lot of new things’. ‘Let me thank you dear friend for the dedication of your new orchestral work The Warriors.’2 Despite Delius’s continuing hope to visit America, in the event no such visit took place. He had wanted to conduct his Piano Concerto with Grainger and to hear Fritz Kreisler performing his Violin Concerto. Delius mentions in this letter that he had been invited by Lloyd Osbourne to stay with him on his ranch in California in 1917. Grainger’s advice is sought regarding how much Delius should expect from an American publisher for several of his scores which he hoped to publish in the USA. We also learn that Delius planned to practise conducting in the winter in readiness for hoped-for conducting engagements in the USA. In October 1916 Delius wrote to Philip Heseltine discussing his views on music and drama on the stage.3 Heseltine had met Cecil Gray earlier in 1916; they were now planning, as Heseltine wrote to Delius on 11th October, to give in a small theatre the following spring a short season of opera and concerts. A Village Romeo and Juliet, ‘one of the loveliest of operas in existence’, as Gray was later to describe it, would be produced, freed of realistic conventions and, in Heseltine’s words ‘not buried beneath a mass of stage properties and theatrical misconceptions … What you have achieved in this work – and it is a great and unique achievement – is a drama in which the various emotions,

DSJ 160 79

brought into play by various contingencies and circumstances, are the real protagonists. But they are not personified in the old allegorical “morality” style. They are far too subtle. They are presented, typified, in certain individuals who appear on the stage. But it is not these individuals who absorb us. The work grips one, entrances one and carries one away because these individuals are so shadowy, so unrealistic that they become symbols of the pure emotion they are feeling’.4 Writing again to Delius on 27th November 1916, Philip Heseltine told him that the recent performance of Delius’s String Quartet by the London String Quartet had been very disappointing. Heseltine said that he hoped ‘you will very speedily come over and give the L.S.Q. party a little sound advice before they give any more unintelligible renderings of your work.’5 We also learn from Heseltine that he had received increased interest in the proposed performances of music by Delius in the forthcoming season. He had had help from Bernard Shaw regarding the kind of theatre to be used for performances.6

Paul Chennell

1 Lionel Carley: Delius: A Life in Letters 1909-1934 (Scolar Press: London, 1988), p170 Note 1 2 Ibid, p171 3 Ibid, p171 4 Ibid, p173 5 Barry Smith (ed): Frederick Delius and Peter Warlock: A Friendship Revealed (OUP, 2000) p237 6 Ibid 

80 DSJ 160

DELIUS’S HOUSTON CONNECTIONS

The following article was written by Dr Don Looser, Vice President Emeritus, Houston Baptist University, for the national convention of the American Guild of Organists, held in Houston, Texas, in June. It appears here at the suggestion of Dr Don Gillespie, author of The Search for Thomas F Ward.

Little changed from the days of its founding, the 1871 Church of the Annunciation is in the shadow of today’s Minute Maid Park, home to the Houston Astros. The church served as home for organist Thomas F Ward (1856-1912) who was the unlikely teacher of English composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934). Ward taught piano, organ, and composition privately in Houston and at St Mary’s Seminary in nearby La Porte—a short train ride away. One of his seminarians James L Drummund later served as organist at Houston’s Sacred Heart Church. Plagued by tuberculosis, Ward found his public music performance schedule greatly limited by his physical condition. Because of this, Ward shared Annunciation organist duties over the years with Cheston Heath, a Harvard graduate who had studied at Boston Conservatory, and also with E G von Hofe and Mrs George Bruce. Thomas Ward grew up as an orphan in Brooklyn, influenced heavily by his Catholic musical upbringing. He graduated from St John’s College in Brooklyn in 1873 and studied composition with the organist John M Loretz Jr, a celebrated composer and virtuoso performer. Ward was heavily influenced by Southern folk music in Brooklyn and by the composer Louis Gottschalk. As his tuberculosis grew more limiting, Ward moved to Florida in 1884 for his health, arriving in Jacksonville virtually at the same time as the English composer Frederick Delius. Delius discovered Ward teaching at the Merryday and Paine Music Store in Jacksonville, and after a brief acquaintance, Delius invited Ward to come to his orange plantation on the St Johns River to teach him composition. During this period, Delius was attended by two former slaves whose musical context heavily influenced his compositional style from this time forward. Ward and Delius spent the better part of that year together at the Solano Grove Plantation. Delius’s future works Florida Suite and Appalachia show decided influences from his days of residency in the South. Delius moved from Florida in 1885 to continue study eventually at the Leipzig Conservatory.

DSJ 160 81

Ultimately, Thomas Ward came to Houston. Through his Annunciation Church responsibilities, Ward became a colleague of Anton Diehl who maintained a large Conservatory of Music in Houston. In addition to his work as an organist, Ward performed as pianist and violist with Diehl’s society orchestra. A 1904 newspaper advertisement also notes Ward as an accompanist for Houston’s inaugural performance of Alfred Gaul’s cantata The Holy City. Over the years, Ward’s health and financial status continued to decline. He died in 1912 in poverty and obscurity, regrettably not living to see his pupil Delius become famous. His burial in Holy Cross Cemetery was paid for by his two Annunciation friends Anton Diehl and Father Thomas Hennessy. A marker placed there in 1993 by Ward’s biographer Don C Gillespie states, ‘Catholic Musician. Teacher of English composer Frederick Delius.’ Gillespie’s book The Search for Thomas F Ward is a compelling chronicle of the era, its social and musical context, and the influence of these two men on each other.

The Rest of the Story In the process of researching for this article, I was able to make contact with Don C Gillespie, the author of the biography of Thomas F Ward and former editor for C F Peters music publishers in New York. In our communication, he expressed concern that the plaque he had commissioned to mark the grave of Ward might not have weathered the Houston environment well since installation in 1993. I offered to go to Holy Cross Cemetery and check on the grave site and invited Carl Cunningham, performing arts critic of the Houston Post, to join me. Cunningham had been interviewed by Gillespie in the writing of the book to see if any Houston octogenarians might have memories of Thomas Ward as a Houston musician. Cunningham wrote an article published in the Houston Post in 1989 seeking any local recollections. Carl and I met at the small Catholic cemetery now suffering neglect and deferred maintenance, but containing the graves of many Houstonians who were buried in the early 20th century. The plaque indeed was sound, but the Florida coquina stone to which it had been attached had disintegrated and the plaque was loose from its moorings. Fearing vandalism, I wrote Gillespie and stated that I was concerned for its safety. Gillespie responded that I should take the plaque for safekeeping while we determined a course of action.

82 DSJ 160

Cunningham, meanwhile, had reported our efforts to Felipe Gasper, current organist and choirmaster at Annunciation Church where Ward had served. Gasper expressed interest in the Annunciation connection and asked to be included in our quest. (That church is reportedly currently working to restore their 1924 Pilcher organ.) Ultimately, I contacted a local grave monument company which was willing to remount the plaque on a block of granite and reinstall it at Holy Cross Cemetery at their cost. As a result, several of us have underwritten the cost of this project. When accomplished, it is our intent to invite a priest from Annunciation church to join us and consecrate the new monument to Thomas F Ward. If my romantic sentimentalism prevails, I may even play a recording of Delius’s Florida Suite as we give thanks for the mentorship of Thomas Ward at his gravesite. The plaque reads:

Thomas F. Ward Catholic Musician (b. Brooklyn c.1856 * d. Houston 1912) Teacher of the English composer Frederick Delius at Solano Grove, Florida 1884-85 “After night has gone comes the day The dark shadows will fade away.”

Don Looser

DSJ 160 83

THREE GOOD READS

For those of us who enjoy reading about Delius, his friends and his music, as well as listening to it, 1976 was a very good year. Fifteen years after the death of Delius’s friend Percy Grainger and also of his friend and great musical champion Sir Thomas Beecham, three books appeared which shed new light on both Delius and Grainger. I waited impatiently in that extraordinarily warm and sunny summer for the appearance of Christopher Palmer’s Delius: Portrait of a Cosmopolitan which considered Delius and his connections with England, Scandinavia, France, Germany and America. This book was a breath of fresh air in the literature dealing with Delius and his music, and was a valuable revelation to those of us who were then still getting to know the music and the man. Christopher Palmer wanted to refute the then commonly held view that Delius was an English composer, having recognised various reasons for believing that Delius was a cosmopolitan. As he says in the Preface to the book: ‘The more we probe the question, in fact, the more uncomfortably do we become aware that in classifying Delius as an exclusively English composer the English claim an unwarranted privilege, for they are but one of a number of possible contenders for the distinction of ownership.’ Palmer wanted to see Delius and his music in a wider perspective. Delius lived in and learnt from several countries, benefiting from the influence of painters and writers as much as other musicians. One of the advantages of the book is its accessibility for the general musical reader who has a basic knowledge of Delius’s music. Whilst presenting Delius as a cosmopolitan, Palmer draws attention to his rebellious nature and his habit of progressing along his own musical path. We also read here of Delius’s musical loneliness, although he had many friends. Palmer thinks it was the loneliness of Delius and his inability to settle wholly in one country – a kind of up-rootedness – which helped to bring about the unique character of his music. Included at the beginning of the book is a note from Eric Fenby which indicates his enthusiasm for what Palmer has to say. The second book from 1976 which left a lasting impression on me was A Delius Companion, edited by Christopher Redwood. This is a celebratory compilation which includes contributions from many writers and

84 DSJ 160 musicians – both contemporary with Delius and those writing in the forty years or so after his death. Christopher Redwood had originally intended to collect together the finest articles on Delius published in the post-war period, but was persuaded by Felix Aprahamian of the importance of a wider collection of articles. Two of the finest are those by Percy Grainger, which examined the personality of Delius, and Deryck Cooke’s essay on Delius and Form. I will not list here all of the items included in this book; suffice it to say it is a treasure chest containing some of the finest writing about Delius available at the time of its publication. The third book which appeared in 1976 was the very influential and important biography of Percy Grainger by John Bird. I well remember my excitement in October 1976 when I went to the publisher’s head office in the Caledonian Road, London, to buy a copy of Percy Grainger, on the day of its publication. After reading this book, this intriguing character became so much more interesting for his musical achievements and his artistic creativity. Since the appearance of the first edition of John Bird’s book there has of course been a vast amount published on Grainger but this is the biography one returns to: it is likely to remain the standard work for many years to come. Of course now we have access to so much more of Grainger’s music on record, no doubt because of the interest in the composer created by this book. As with Lionel Carley’s Delius: A Life in Letters, the extraordinarily large number of people who were known to Grainger or who influenced his thought and work, is reflected in the index of this book. John Bird makes clear in his Preface that he will not be burdening us with any psychological explanations for Grainger’s thought, and leaves musical analysis to the musicologists of whose work he is rather sceptical. This book reflects Grainger’s enormous energy and enthusiasm for all aspects of music. Perhaps our response to the book can be summed up in these words from the Preface, written by and Peter Pears: ‘In John Bird’s sympathetic and tactful biography he has beautifully balanced the brilliance and turbulence of this unbalanced genius – we are grateful to him’. Indeed – now as then – we are grateful to John Bird for this wonderful biography.

Paul Chennell 

DSJ 160 85

BRAVING THE WEB FOR DELIUS …

Jayne Strutt, who has developed the Delius Society YouTube channel, explains how easy it is to get online and explore the feast of music and video that is available there.

If you have not already discovered the veritable hall of Delian treasures available on the Society’s YouTube channel within a click or two, I encourage you to ‘feel the fear’ and venture boldly forth into cyber space! Contrary to common belief you do not have to ‘sign in’, obtain a ‘password’ or answer any inane questions to do so! The really good news is that a safe haven has now been created to welcome the cautious discerning Delian browser, well away from the nasty trolls (Grieg’s traditional ones apart), scammers and hackers. Once you have arrived and made sure the sound is turned up on your computer, a warm welcome awaits with old and familiar friends, and new ones waiting in the wings eager to share their secrets. Start by opening your browser and finding the Delius Society website (www.delius.org.uk), then click on the red circle that says ‘YouTube’ on the top right of the homepage. On your first visit to the Delius YouTube Channel a popular trailer video will probably automatically start introducing you to the home page. Currently playing is a clip featuring The Song of the High Hills mountain climbing sequence, original footage from Ken Russell’s acclaimed film, . Have a look at the various ‘playlists’ and ‘features’ to see what’s on offer. Each ‘playlist’ contains a choice selection of videos hand-picked from the web to provide the best experience for the discerning Delian. Choose from a selection that is filmic, biographical, historical or featuring actual performances. Most videos provide a visual interpretation inspired by the music, with each being a unique interpretation of the composer’s work born out of a real musical empathy with the subject. Although some performance repetition is normal depending on the popularity of the piece, the video content is personal and is infinitely variable. Generally videos made by the enthusiast are not made for profit; you may however see short-term adverts at the start, or brief pop-ups on the screen, any revenue thus made covering copyright claims from the recording company. These ads can easily be removed by clicking the corner ‘X’. Your Delius YouTube channel provides the very best guide to the video’s content, categorising the selections in

86 DSJ 160 terms of visual content as well as the music. For example many makers have used the medium of carefully chosen paintings to accompany the music, others have chosen photography or simply the mechanics of following a musical score. Many contributors take trouble to provide informative notes and details of the recording or performance used; it’s a good idea therefore to scroll the page upwards thus revealing the text displayed below the playing video. You can always ‘pause’ the video whilst doing so, the icons for playing, pausing, forward and reverse are standard ones used on all domestic recorders – just use the mouse to click appropriately. Once you have finished with an item simply click on something else or return to the home page, where you started. Genuinely it should provide a positive and rewarding experience that will I hope eventually become a pleasant routine engagement. For those of you familiar with Delius on Facebook or Twitter, there are usually links provided to the latest items showing on the YouTube channel. So, if you have not yet ventured into the realms of cyber space before, why deny yourself any longer? Most of you, but by no means all will use a computer to access the net, but a smart phone or tablet will also do the job, with the page condensed down to fit on a small screen. If you choose this route, download the device’s YouTube application or ‘app’. For those equipped with a ‘Smart Television’, this is by far the most exciting way to enjoy the video channel in full high definition by means of the app provided. And if you have a modern television that is NOT a ‘Smart’ or ‘internet’ one but with an ‘HDMI’ connection, you can purchase an adaptor to convert your set. The ‘Fire Stick’, currently available from Amazon for a few pounds, will give you access to YouTube and other internet sites by just plugging in and ‘wirelessly’ connecting to the internet. Just one word of caution, all of this depends on your broadband signal which varies greatly from place to place; generally speaking the further you are away from cities and towns the slower is the broadband speed and the less reliable it will be for continuous video playback. Finally, like it or not, as far as today’s rapid pace of change goes, we have a clear choice to make, embrace it or lose out! The almost poetic irony is that today’s obsession with often misused internet technology has also become a crucible of fine art, music and culture in an increasingly detached

DSJ 160 87 and material world. So ‘feel the fear’ if you have not done so already, and let Frederick Delius, true musical genius and apostle of Mother Nature, shine through all the extraneous internet interference. Or just simply escape to where you belong!

Jayne Anne Strutt YouTube Channel Developer

88 DSJ 160

OBITUARIES

PETER HARRIS (1931-2016)

Peter Harris, a longstanding member of the Society sadly passed away last February. His wife Joan remembers that they greatly enjoyed their visits to Delius Society meetings in years gone by. Peter’s career was in teaching and educational administration. The eulogy at his funeral states that after a three year commission in the RAF Flight Lieutenant Peter Harris took up a teaching post at Wolverhampton Grammar School, the school where he was educated as a boy. Peter is remembered as an inspirational teacher, who unlike many, actually prepared his lessons in advance. He later moved to Highfields School, Wolverhampton as Head of Sixth Form. One of his pupils there remembers how he gave hours of his time to help pupils perform to their very best when he directed musical productions. He also performed and is remembered as giving an astonishing performance as Koko in The Mikado. In 1964 he was one of the first four members of staff appointed to establish a brand new comprehensive school in the Midlands. He was remembered for thorough teaching and making his pupils love literature. He helped and nurtured pupils and fellow staff members alike. In 1968 he moved into teacher training at City of Birmingham College of Education. One of his students wrote this about him: ’He was serious, cultural and erudite. He always had a book in his hand. He had a deep interest in enabling students to fly. His alternative English course had a strand of drama. He had a lifelong love affair with the printed, sung and spoken word.’ In 1972 Peter became Assistant Education Officer for Staffordshire. He retired in 1989. His vocation for making a difference in education was Peter’s life’s work and he was quite rightly proud of what he achieved. There were many other aspects of his life that gave him pleasure, satisfaction and an opportunity to excel, notably music and the performing arts which were at the heart of Peter and Joan’s life. Peter sang in local choirs and enjoyed performing in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. In 2000 Peter contributed a most interesting talk to the Midlands Branch entitled ‘A Bitter Truth – Some British composers and the Great

DSJ 160 89

War’ in which he included many apposite musical and literary illustrations. The aim of the talk was to examine the effect of the First World War on the lives and music of British composers and those members lucky enough to hear the talk were greatly impressed by it. We in The Delius Society are lucky to have members like Peter who bring their many talents to enrich our Society. Peter died on 2nd February 2016 aged 84. His many friends will miss him.

Paul Chennell

CHARLES DOWNING BARNARD

As the Journal was going to print, we received the sad news of the death of one of the Society’s founder members, Charles Barnard, on 30th September 2016. He died peacefully following many years of ill health. A full obituary will be included in DSJ 161.

90 DSJ 160

RETHINKING DELIUS – A CRITICAL SYMPOSIUM

The Foyle Room, The British Library, London Friday 15th July 2016

Welcome/Introduction to the Delius Catalogue of Works Daniel Grimley, University of Oxford and AHRC Project Principal Investigator, and Joanna Bullivant, Research Assistant

Session 1: Delius’s Landscapes Delius, Cable and Wexford’s Koanga Peter Franklin, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford Multidimensionality, landscape and modernism in the music of Delius David Byrne, University of Manitoba Cosmopolitanism, Race and Landscape in Percy Grainger’s American ‘Delius Campaign’ Sarah Kirby, University of Melbourne

Session 2: Defining Delius Delius, whoever he may be Anthony Gritten, Royal Academy of Music Delius and operatic verism Christopher Redwood, Independent Scholar The rhetoric of national character: anti-intellectualism and the case of Delius Sarah Collins, University of New South Wales

Keynote Lecture The partsong as topos in the music of Delius Jeremy Dibble, University of Durham

Daniel Grimley, introducing the Symposium, explained that it was held in association with his Arts and Humanities Research Council project ‘Delius, Modernism and the Sound of Place’, which is supported by three project partners: the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, the British Library, and the Danish Centre for Music Publication at the Royal Library, Denmark. Joanna Bullivant then justified the need for a new catalogue of Delius’s works on the grounds that the existing catalogues (that of Rachel Lowe and the two of Robert Threlfall) are now out of date and must be consulted

DSJ 160 91 together. A unifying digital catalogue, which will be freely accessible and searchable, is now being compiled and some pages from the website on which they will be found were demonstrated. Robert Threlfall’s catalogue numbers are abandoned and each work is to be given a new ‘DCW’ (ie ‘Delius Catalogue of Works’) number. The digital catalogue is not yet available, but a little more information can be found at: https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/digital/2016/02/01/joanna-bullivant/ Peter Franklin compared similarities and differences between the libretto of Delius’s opera Koanga (‘always a problem piece’ he remarked) and the relevant part of Cable’s novel The Grandissimes. He addressed the bold assessment of the opera by Michael Gieleta, director of the recent Wexford production, as ‘one of the most avant-garde works of its time’. [A transcript of his lecture is reproduced on page 52.] David Byrne provided the audience with two handouts, one showing quotations from the scores of Auf den Bergen (A Mass of Life) and North Country Sketches and the other his own ‘layer reductions’ of the same excerpts, which he used to challenge the conventional assertion that Delius’s music has a ‘vertical’ harmonic structure. Sarah Kirby spoke about Percy Grainger’s frenetic manipulation of Delius’s image in America; though Grainger asserted that Delius promoted American music and nature music, the critics could not find the evidence. On 27th November 1915 the music critic of the Morning Telegraph wrote to protest: ‘Percy Grainger, the pianist, who has been literally acclaimed in New York, and deservedly so, not only as a costly exotic golden human chrysanthemum, but as a composer and pianist of striking merit, makes a serious error when he compromises the prosperity of his own appearances by foisting the compositions of his British compatriots upon us. Yesterday it was Delius of Bradford, Yorkshire, who spins music, much as the looms of his native town manufacture cloth …’ For those who may be interested, Sarah Kirby’s masters thesis is available online at: goo.gl/P4pG5R After lunch, Anthony Gritten presented a revised version of his talk ‘Delius, whoever he may be’ which he had given at the Symposium preceding The Delius Prize competition at the Royal Academy of Music on 18th May 2016. This concentrated on Delius’s only essay in neo-classicism, the Dance for Harpsichord, which was first published in the January 1920 edition of Music and Letters, possibly to complement an essay by Violet Gordon

92 DSJ 160

Woodhouse entitled Old Keyed Instruments and their Music. Dr Gritten used this piece as a means to explore Delius’s reputation among his contemporaries. [A transcript of this lecture is reproduced on page 61.] Christopher Redwood, one-time Editor of The Delius Society Journal, spoke on Margot la Rouge, developing his contention, stated in his chapter in A Delius Companion (John Calder, 1976) that this work ‘contains a sufficient streak of verism to satisfy an Italian publisher.’ Last in the second part of the Symposium came Sarah Collins, who delivered a talk that ingeniously included references to the EU Referendum, as well as being laced with memorable quotations. For many years Delius’s style was largely accepted as intuitive or instinctual, a view endorsed in 1962 by both Peter Heyworth and Rollo Myers, and the contention was that this English ‘amateurism’ made him de facto a composer of the people. ‘Art for art’s sake has never flourished among the English-speaking nations’, wrote (Should Music be National?, in National Music and Other Essays, OUP 1934). This was perhaps the general view of the music of Delius until a little later in the centenary year of 1962, when Deryck Cooke came to its rescue with his demonstration, published in The Musical Times, of the formal structure of the Violin Concerto. The last item on the programme of the Symposium was Professor Jeremy Dibble’s Keynote Lecture, in which he reviewed with recorded illustrations the genre of the part-song throughout the range of Delius’s output, beginning with the Ave Maria of 1887, proceeding through the operas – for example the female voices of the Spirits of the Fountain in The Magic Fountain – to Appalachia and Sea Drift, with what he identified in the latter as its four part-songs, on to and finally the ‘official’ part-songs themselves. He concluded that the part-song was a major artistic component of Delius’s inspiration, a ‘quintessential generative idiom’. This Symposium, a worthy successor to The Delius Society’s own two- day Delius in 2012: an International Celebration, also held at the British Library, demonstrated very clearly that there is always more to be discovered and discussed about Delius and his music, as is also apparent at six-month intervals in The Delius Society Journal. It was encouraging that many of the speakers, whilst undoubtedly expert in their own areas, were relatively new to the subject. Their level of endeavour was impressive and their enthusiasm infectious.

DSJ 160 93

It had however been a long and challenging programme, so the wine reception that followed was most welcome. Some members of the audience later went on to a recital at the nearby St Pancras Church, played by Clare Wheeler (violin) and Suzy Ruffles (piano), which included Delius’s Violin Sonata No 3 and Elgar’s Violin Sonata. According to a description on the Delius, Modernism and the Sound of Place website (see: https://deliusmodernism.wordpress.com/2016/07/18/rethinking-delius-a- critical-symposium/) they played ‘with great passion and sensitivity’.

Roger Buckley

94 DSJ 160

CONCERT REVIEWS

A MASS OF LIFE Carnegie Hall, New York April 5th 2016 Sarah Fox soprano Audrey Babcock mezzo-soprano, Rodrick Dixon tenor Thomas Cannon baritone Bard Festival Chorale American Symphony Orchestra Leon Botstein conductor

The significance of this performance merits more than one article; below you will find an extended essay by Alan Becker, and a concert review by Roger Buckley.

From Alan Becker: Who says you can’t go home again? Returning to the city of my birth after a long absence, I was greeted by a raw chilly rain accompanied by gusty winds. As if lathered on, the city’s congestion had reached epic proportions far beyond what I had remembered. Almost every other street seemed dominated by fast food joints such as Chipotle and Subway. An abundance of construction scaffolding, necessitated venturing forth frequently from street to gutter to avoid the barriers. This Floridian was prepared to brave it all for some historic architecture I had not remembered, and (of course) the anticipation of attending a performance of Frederick Delius’s rarely heard (at least in the United States) A Mass of Life. Such an event almost made me forget my former city’s unexpectedly severe April greeting, as I was fully prepared for spring’s still wintery blast. Alas, a side visit to the musical instrument rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, found them closed for renovation. The Serpent will have to await another visit, another time. Based on Nietzsche’s text for Also Sprach Zarathustra, Delius’s massive edifice, celebrating man rather than God, has not been heard in the United States for decades. Stephen Lloyd of The Delius Society, thought the last performance to have been on May 15th 1979 under Paul Callaway in Washington, DC, although I have been unable to verify this, other than it

DSJ 160 95 did not take place at Washington’s famous Cathedral. Prior to that, Walter Susskind conducted several performances in 1974, both in St. Louis and in New York. In his pre-concert talk Leon Botstein, Conductor, and President of Bard College, spoke about Nietzsche and his philosophy turning religion on its end. This was a primary attraction for the atheistic Delius, and helped in the formation of his life’s philosophies. Botstein also took a few questions from the audience, including one from a man who claimed to have travelled the world and heard the Mass many times. His stated travels included Florida, although no performance has ever taken place in that state. April 5th, in a packed Carnegie Hall, proved to be a most memorable date as Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra and the Bard Festival Chorale in what many consider to be Delius’s magnum opus. Baritone Thomas Cannon had the most prominent role, and a strong voice that projected well as the embodiment of Zarathustra. Most of his part was delivered without the score in hand, and he had fully absorbed the Delius idiom and vocal expression. The other soloists, tenor Rodrick Dixon, Soprano Sarah Fox, and Mezzo-soprano Audrey Babcock, were nearly all one could ask for in terms of vocal quality. More importantly, they had the ability to ride the crest of sound when the composer unleashed his full forces of orchestra and double chorus. If the acoustic failed a bit in lending depth to the vocal performances, it might have been due to my center row orchestra seat—quite a bit different from the balcony seats I had known from my youth. The hall, which had been renovated some years ago might also have accounted for the acoustical difference. The orchestra, once associated with Stokowski, played very well for Botstein, who tended to speed, rather than indulge, some of the tempi. The mercilessly exposed French horns at the start of part two handled their parts faultlessly, and the distant mountain calls were of sublime beauty with their echoes both on and offstage. The decision to have an intermission between the two parts of the work was understandable, although I would have preferred the Mass to be played without interruption. The standard procedure of having soloists and chorus rise and sit between sections also presented a visual distraction from what could have been a more sustained musical rapture. It was easy to forgive the audience for their applause after the towering first chorus ‘Oh thou my Will! dispeller thou of care!’. Less forgivable was their burst of applause after the final glorious choral peroration, covering up the quiet

96 DSJ 160 closing measures. During most of the Mass the audience was unusually quiet, as if transfixed by the sounds they were listening to. Delius’s music was both typical and atypical of the composer. His mature and unique chromaticism was present in abundance, but so was a vigour and moving grandiloquence, especially in the Meistersinger-like dance songs that contrast with the composer’s usually quiet reflectiveness. The writing for the double chorus is especially difficult in both its chromatic idiom and unusual intervals. While the Bard Festival Chorus may have lacked the sheer numbers of some of their British counterparts, they sang lustily, and with full throated volume when the music required, and there was never any feeling that they were underpowered for the task at hand. Intonation, always a problem with music of this complexity, was not an issue as they were secure in their training under Choral Director James Bagwell, who took a much deserved bow after the performance. If I could ultimately conceive of a more memorable performance, that’s what music is all about—the unending quest for that perfect performance, thankfully unattainable to keep us constantly coming back for more. When the concert ended, it was evident that something very special had just taken place, and one of music’s greatest outpourings of life-affirming hedonistic beauty had again revealed itself. Memorable, yes, unforgettable, without a doubt, despite the few reservations.

Alan Becker

From Roger Buckley: In his pre-concert talk Mr Botstein spoke about Nietzsche, but rather little about the libretto of A Mass of Life, and even less about Delius’s creation itself. Questions were invited from the floor and some rather ill-informed exchanges resulted. At the end, one felt that the members of the audience at this ‘Conductor Notes Q&A / Lecture’ session had not been given information which could have enhanced their understanding and enjoyment. The Hall was impressively full at the beginning of the evening; doubtless some of the seats were occupied by subscribers rather than casual attenders. Regrettably, this was no longer the case after the interval. From our vantage point in the circle (all of whose seats are in boxes thoughtfully

DSJ 160 97

provided with doors that can be made to close silently on departure) we could witness the exodus continuing throughout the evening. This was a great pity and again one felt that a more enthusiastic and informative introduction from Mr Botstein might have encouraged a larger proportion of his audience to sample the entire performance of what, for many, must have been a completely unknown work. He might even have borne in mind the comment of The New York Times critic, who remarked, of the Botstein/ASO all-Reger concert the previous month at the same venue: ‘Many people headed for the exits at intermission’. The performance began well, with the fast tempo and precision ensemble that together allow the first chorus fully to arouse emotions and expectations. (It is interesting that a number of American commentators were later to complain about the generally brisk tempi, for we in this country have come to expect them in certain parts of this work.) From the start, we could appreciate the real stars of the show, namely the members of the Bard Festival Chorale, whose predominantly young voices made little of the technical difficulty of much of the choral writing. It was refreshing, even liberating, not to have to anticipate the usual moments of strain, especially for the sopranos at the tops of their registers. Delius would have thoroughly approved. He might not have been so happy with the balance, which is of course entirely the conductor’s responsibility. The four soloists rose bravely to their challenges, but were not helped by Mr Botsteins’s failure to moderate the American Symphony Orchestra’s generally excessive dynamic. Audrey Babcock, the mezzo soprano, made the most of her small but lovely part. The baritone Thomas Cannon – perhaps the first Afro-American Zarathustra? – sang with conviction and sincerity, and impressively from memory throughout long passages, but the overall balance of sound was against him and we, in the centre of the circle, which should guarantee some of the best sound in the house, found him overwhelmed. Throughout the performance, a true ppp was almost never achieved, though the off-stage horn in Auf den Bergen, the magical interlude at the beginning of Part 2, did sound suitably distant. This limitation of the overall dynamic range was important, too, in other parts of the work, never more noticeably than in the chorus Heisser Mittag schläft auf den Fluren, with its wonderful opening woodwind conversations and rapt sense of timelessness.

98 DSJ 160

Photo: Roger Buckley Roger Photo:

Conclusion of A Mass of Life, Carnegie Hall

Though these reservations were real on the night and have not diminished over time, they cannot detract from the heroic work that went into this extremely praiseworthy attempt to bring one of Delius’s largest works to the American public in one of New York’s most prestigious venues. The performance certainly did not deserve to be ignored by The New York Times.

Roger Buckley

DSJ 160 99

REQUIEM IN BIELEFELD Rudolf-Oetker-Halle, Bielefeld April 15th and 17th 2016 Nietzsche Hymnus an das Leben Delius Requiem Richard Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra Melanie Kreuter soprano Frank Dolphin Wong baritone Bielefeld Opera Chorus Oratorienchor der Stadt Bielefeld Bielefeld Philharmonic Orchestra Alexander Kalajdzcic conductor

Nowadays it’s not very often that Delius compositions are given in Bielefeld, the Westphalian town of his ancestors. But in the past there have been some remarkable performances. Most notable was Eine Messe des Lebens (A Mass of Life) in 1990 as the opening concert of the Westphalian Music Festival (and broadcast by Westdeutscher Rundfunk – WDR) and, two years earlier, the opera Fennimore und Gerda. In January 2015 another important Delius work came to Bielefeld: A Village Romeo and Juliet (Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe). The Black Fiddler was interpreted excellently by Frank Dolphin Wong, a baritone who a year later would sing in the 2016 Bielefeld Requiem. And in the Requiem, too, the soprano was Melanie Kreuter who had sung as the Gingerbread Woman in that same Village Romeo. I personally have known Delius’s Requiem since its first LP recording in the late sixties. Later, the CDs by Richard Hickox and an unofficial recording by Sir (Liverpool 1965) came to my knowledge. All these recordings were sung in English (a version by Heseltine of the German text) so I grew up with the English words and found them quite suitable and natural sounding to the music. I was therefore very curious about this composition being performed with the original German text and looked forward to learning how this might work with the music. Early in the morning of 17th April my wife Annegrete and I travelled by High Speed train from Cologne to Bielefeld to attend what promised to be a really interesting concert to be given in the great hall of the Rudolf- Oetker-Halle (inspired by Rudolf, son of the founder of the well-known

100 DSJ 160

Oetker company, Dr August Oetker, and built in 1928). The hall is plain, architecturally speaking, not unlike the famous Bauhaus style, and its acoustics are well known. The hall possesses an ‘invisible’ organ (the only one in North-Rhine-) built by Wilhelm Sauer, Frankfurt/Oder, which is situated behind the orchestra’s stage. It was to be put to good use that day in Also sprach Zarathustra. The concert programme brought to us by conductor Alexander Kalajdzcic and his Bielefeld Philharmonic Orchestra seemed to be (and was indeed) most interesting: the spirit of Nietzsche applied to all parts of the concert, even if not quite so precisely to the Delius Requiem. Regrettably, the Requiem’s co-librettist Heinrich Simon was not mentioned at all in the programme. The concert began with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Hymnus an das Leben (Hymn to Life) sung by the Bielefeld Opera Chorus. It is well known that the philologist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also composed music, though with varying success – Hans von Bülow wrote, for example, a shattering critique of Nietzsche’s Manfred-Meditation. In my opinion it is difficult to find any great quality in Hymnus an das Leben, which Hans von Bülow refused to take up. In the Delius Requiem the Bielefeld Opera Chorus was greatly enlarged by the Oratorienchor der Stadt Bielefeld (a very capable amateur chorus). The performance of the two choirs in the Requiem was rightly hailed by the audience and the press. This also applies to the soloists Melanie Kreuter, soprano, and especially to the baritone, Frank Dolphin Wong: Neue Westfälische ‘With its introvertedly-reflecting and soaring passages, this poetically intoxicated hymn to life and nature succeeds in conveying to us images that are full of atmosphere.’ Westfalenblatt ‘Although Delius illustrates the text in a musically impressive way – at times darkly murmuring, and then with silvery dazzling strings, with imposing climaxes, with grotesque battle cries, exclamatory recitative, mocking brass und many more delights – this rather awkward and dissonant work does not make things easy at first listening. Nevertheless one must take one’s hat off to the Opera- and Oratory-Choruses (Hagen Enke), who reacted reliably, flexibly and expressively to an orchestra that went to work with precision and with a zest for the painting of sounds;

DSJ 160 101

Peter Dieterling - Hans Photo:

Conclusion of the Requiem, Rudolf-Oetker-Halle, Bielefeld

and to the vocal soloists Melanie Kreuter and Frank Dolphin Wong who mastered the balancing act between sensitivity of expression and vigour.’ As to the text used in the performance I have to say that the original German text does in my opinion fit the music really well, as in the opening chorus: ‘Es gleicht ein Tag dem andern, den jeder ist vollendet in der Nacht, und stirbt und kehrt nicht mehr zurück.’ At a time when the general preference is perhaps to perform any composition in its original form, no-one should have any reservation about giving Delius’s Requiem in its original language. A negative example of how translation of a text to music can be poor can be found in the German translation of Sea Drift (Im Meerestreiben) that Carl Schuricht used for his three recordings. The original Whitman text (in English) is ideal and should not be converted into any other language. After the Delius Requiem – which was inevitably unfamiliar to the Bielefeld audience – the third part of the concert was indeed ‘popular’: Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, excellently played by the Bielefeld

102 DSJ 160

Philharmonic Orchestra under Alexander Kalajdzcic. Here the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche returned and found musical expression in this familiar Strauss composition.

Hans-Peter Dieterling

Readers may also be interested in a review of the performance of the Requiem in Cardiff on page 104.

DELIUS AND IVOR GURNEY The Ivor Gurney Society Weekend St Andrew’s Church, Churchdown, Gloucester 7th May 2016 Midori Komachi violin, Simon Callaghan piano

The Ivor Gurney Society holds an annual Spring meeting, covering Gurney and non-Gurney literary and music subjects – and on this well-attended day there was a talk, followed by a general discussion, on the poet Edmund Blunden, and a recital of English music for violin and piano. Midori Komachi and Simon Callaghan are now an established duo, who really understand Delius’s idiom, play superbly together and are supremely musical. She has a lovely tone, and spins a long line, and he never overstates the piano part. Gustav Holst’s heart-warmingly lyrical Song without Words opened the programme, and was followed by the first performance, some 95 years after it was written, of the slow movement (the only one he actually completed) of Gurney’s Sonata in F. Delius’s Third Sonata was one of his last works, (although its origins go back to 1924) and, as a review of the premiere said, the melodies are simple and characteristic, and the writing is devoid of any complexities. Komachi and Callaghan exactly caught the wistfulness of the outer movements and the carefree mood of the middle one. As she says in her note to their recording of the work ‘Delius's music opens an infinite space of imagination’ – and this performance, on a sunny May afternoon, did exactly

DSJ 160 103 that. It was simply lovely. The Ivor Gurney Society is a small but enthusiastic group – and like us is extremely lucky in having a number of real specialists to call on for talks and articles. If you think that Gurney is a composer whose music you might be glad to get know, do join! The Society has an excellent website.

Martin Lee-Browne

REQUIEM IN CARDIFF (A Somme anniversary concert) BBC Hoddinott Hall, Wales Millennium Centre 1st July 2016 Elizabeth Watts soprano Mark Stone baritone Philip Dukes viola BBC National Chorus & Orchestra of Wales Adrian Partington conductor

Without question – and notwithstanding that Jelka certainly did – Delius never had anything to do with curates. Nevertheless, the Requiem may, hopefully not too unfairly, be described as his curate’s egg. There are some Delians who have the highest regard for it (including my co-author, Paul Guinery), and some who haven’t, but it is arguably the least successful, and almost certainly the least-often performed, of all Delius’s choral works. It is also one of the hardest to write about. There are several problems. First, the question ‘What is the work about?’ It is difficult to relate Delius’s statement that ‘[Its] underlying belief is that of a pantheism that insists on the Reality of Life’ with either the words or the music. Pantheism is a doctrine that identifies God with the universe – but Delius once said to Eric Fenby ‘God? I don't know Him.’ The work’s dedication is ‘To the memory of all young Artists fallen in the War’, but according to his correspondence the work was started almost a year before the Great War and actually completed in 1916 – but the

104 DSJ 160 first score was not published until 1920, and it is therefore difficult to know why or when Delius added it, or which artists he had in mind. He is not known to have corresponded with or met any of those who died in the War: (to choose the best known) the composers Butterworth, Gurney, Cecil Coles, F S Kelly and W Denis Browne; the poets Siegfried Sassoon, Julian Grenfell, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and Isaac Rosenberg (also a painter), and the French critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire. One wants to be moved by the idea of all those artists losing their lives, but, for this reviewer at least, that sadly never happens. The second problem is the text – partly cobbled-together, paraphrased bits of Nietzsche and partly from Ecclesiastes. Apart from three uses of the word ‘die’ and references to Death in the second movement, it simply does not seem to be appropriate to a requiem. Then there is the uncompromising nature of the first movement, and the first half of the second. Apart from the very Vaughan Williams-like first few bars, and the forty or so of echt- Delius 8-part choral writing that follow, the baritone soloist’s line is uncomfortable, and the music becomes increasingly harsh and sinewy, leading inexorably to the ff Hallelujahs and Allah il Allahs. Happily, thereafter it is increasingly ‘Delian’, and the last three movements are truly romantic – if not very ‘requiem-like’. Finally, although the last three movements are full of marvellously echt radiant Delian music for the voices, and it is ‘through-composed’, with only a brief pause between the five movements, in terms of being a requiem it never seems to be going anywhere. The end is marvellous because of the sound, but it could not be said to be a moving memorial to the dedicatees. The work does not succeed as a requiem for the simple reason that Delius was not a Christian. That said, apart from a few rough moments in the orchestra, and scruples apart, the performance was close to perfection. Adrian Partington, the Director of Music at Gloucester Cathedral, and the Artistic Director of the BBC National Chorus of Wales, although not hitherto a regular conductor of Delius, clearly understands and sympathises warmly with the idiom. As always, his Chorus was extremely well prepared, seeming to have no problem with the rarely-used German text; their words were good, and the sopranos soared to their top Bs and B flats. Elizabeth Watts was radiant, particularly in the final movement, and Mark Stone was rock-solid in the angular and ungrateful baritone part - this

DSJ 160 105 music seemed to suit him much better than the solo songs which he recorded some five years ago. The 350-or-so seat hall was well filled. Howells’ Elegy, for viola, string quartet and string orchestra, which was given a lovely performance with Philip Dukes as the soloist, is hardly a crowd-puller, so in view of the slight nature of the other works in the programme – Butterworth, Gordon Jacob and Roussel – it seems reasonable to assume that a good many of them had come to hear the Delius. If so, good news indeed!

Martin Lee-Browne

Readers may also be interested in a review of the performance of the Requiem in Bielefeld on page 100.

106 DSJ 160

CD REVIEWS

A VILLAGE ROMEO AND JULIET Sali – John Wakefield Vreli – Elsie Morison The Dark Fiddler- Neil Easton Manz – Lawrence Felley Marti – Donald McIntyre Sali as a child – Soo Bee Lee Vreli as a child – Sheila Amit Sadler’s Wells Chorus (Chorus Master: David Tod Boyd) Sadler’s Wells Orchestra (Barry Collins leader) conductor Live recording, sung in English, broadcast on 11th April 1962

THE WALK TO THE PARADISE GARDEN Blue Network Symphony Orchestra Sir Thomas Beecham conductor Live broadcast from the Ritz Theatre, New York City, 7th April 1945

Total duration: 1:49:33 Pristine Audio PACO 132

In 1962, the Delius centenary year, Sadler’s Wells put on a rare production of A Village Romeo and Juliet conducted by Meredith Davies. A live performance was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in April of that year and the tapes from that broadcast have now been issued as a two CD set by Sarl Pristine Audio in France – according to the sleeve notes this constitutes the sixth recording of the opera. The notes also explain how Sarl cleaned up the original tapes (mainly removing electrical hum and tape joins) and applied their Ambient Stereo processing to what was originally a mono recording to produce a CD whose sound is remarkably good. The very low level of tape hiss is most impressive.

DSJ 160 107

The first thing to stress is that this is a recording of a live performance and there are of course the inevitable audience coughs and occasionally intrusive stage noises which even Sarl could not remove. Early in the opera it sounds as if the Dark Fiddler has knocked over some scenery (and he’s not even started partying at the ‘Paradise Garden’!). But overall, the sound quality is surprisingly good, even though it was probably recorded with only a few microphones. The voices are usually pretty clear and well balanced against the orchestra though there are some balance problems within the orchestra itself. The English libretto is based on Delius’s original text, but with many beneficial changes which improve some of the composer’s more awkward phraseology. Unfortunately, the sleeve note doesn’t identify the author of these changes. Some, but not all, are in Meredith Davies’s 1973 recording. John Wakefield and Elsie Morison are splendid as Sali and Vreli respectively, giving passionate, committed performances. Morison’s high notes are particularly impressive and her top C on the word ‘killed’ near the end of Scene 3 (when Sali attempts to kill Marti) is a thrilling moment. Neil Easton is an impressive Dark Fiddler but Sali and Vreli as children are less convincing: Sheila Amit as the young Vreli has too much operatic vibrato to persuade me that she is a child. As Manz, Lawrence Felley has a tendency to bawl and his pitching is inclined to be erratic but perhaps this is appropriate for a peasant farmer! The many other supporting roles are generally satisfactory. The chorus are only clearly audible in the passage which follows The Walk to the Paradise Garden, lightly accompanied by cellos and basses. Here, there are noticeable intonation problems and a certain lack of synchronisation with the orchestra. Elsewhere it’s hard to hear them clearly – this is partly due to the thickness of Delius’s accompaniment but exacerbated by the balance on this recording. Balance within the orchestra is also a consistent problem. Upper strings are always prominent whilst horns, timpani and brass generally tend to be in the background and are often virtually inaudible when playing pianissimo, so that some of Delius’s subtle detail is unfortunately lost. This is likely to be because these instruments were probably at the back of the orchestra pit, well under the stage, and therefore not always picked up by microphones if they were in the auditorium. Some of Delius’s complex tutti passages are very unclear – especially in the Wedding and Fairground scenes. The glockenspiel is much too prominent and in the opening of the

108 DSJ 160

Fairground scene it is the loudest instrument in the orchestra and the only one that can be heard clearly! Meredith Davies’s fondness for some very brisk tempi makes for exciting moments but not everyone can keep up and ensemble is occasionally messy. His tempi work well in scenes such as the build-up to the confrontational moments between the farmers, and between Sali and Marti (not Delius’s best music, it has to be said, but improved with a brisk tempo). The Dark Fiddler’s violin solo just after the final love-duet is taken at a quite dazzling speed but I would have liked a slower-paced duet itself – it is all over too quickly. There is much beautiful playing from the Sadler’s Wells Orchestra, especially from the strings in the passages linking scenes in the early part of the opera and from the upper woodwind generally, though I find the rather nasal and edgy tone of the orchestra’s cor anglais unattractive. Overall, the performance is similar to Davies’s 1973 studio recording (the total length for both is almost the same) but some tempi tend to be faster and the orchestra is much less well balanced. As a reprocessed recording of a live performance made over fifty years ago sound quality and clarity are remarkably good but it clearly cannot compare with modern recordings. However, all things considered, it is an impressive and fascinating historic recording of a fine performance. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who wanted just one recording of A Village Romeo – there are many others to choose from – but Delians who want to complete their collections of what is surely Delius’s best opera will probably want to buy it. The CD set comes with remarkably little information: no libretto or background notes, just a short but very positive contemporary review of the production by David Cairns from The Spectator, plus a note on how the tapes were re-mastered. There are surprisingly few tracks on each CD – just eight for the whole opera which makes locating particular moments difficult. The live performance ends with the applause followed by the cast list read by a Third Programme announcer whose plummy voice today has an amusing period flavour and reminds us what the BBC sounded like just fifty years ago! As a fill-up there is a historic recording of The Walk to the Paradise Garden by Beecham in a live 1945 performance with an American orchestra. It’s a typically indulgent interpretation but so severely marred by appalling distortion and surface noise that one wonders what this really adds to our knowledge of Beecham’s performances of the Walk.

DSJ 160 109

In this review I have speculated on how the placing of the BBC microphones might have compromised the recorded balance. I would be very interested to hear from any DSJ readers who saw this Sadler’s Wells production and can remember enough about it to tell us what it really sounded like.

Tony Summers

Readers might like to know that Elsie Morison who sings Vreli on this recording died in April this year, aged 91. Obituaries appeared in The Times (26th April), Telegraph (5th May), Scotsman (29th April), Royal Opera House Magazine (27th April) and no doubt elsewhere but none of them that I have read mention the Village Romeo performances (TS).

110 DSJ 160

DVD REVIEWS

KEN RUSSELL: THE GREAT COMPOSERS Elgar; The Debussy Film; Song of Summer 3 Disc Set BFIB 1244 British Film Institute DVD and Blu-ray formats

Almost fifty years after it was first shown on BBC television, is now available again with two other films which deal with Elgar and Debussy respectively, all made by Ken Russell and reissued here by the British Film Institute. The set also contains archive film and contributions by Ken Russell, Michael Kennedy, Michael Bradsell and Kevin Flanagan. Of most interest to Delians will be the audio commentary on Song of Summer recorded by Ken Russell in 2002. Russell, along with all the other film makers who worked on the BBC TV Monitor programmes, had been encouraged by the editor, Huw Wheldon, to make documentaries about their hobbies; Russell’s hobby was music so he made films about composers. Because of the modest BBC budget Russell had to find a location which would pass as France but would be within spitting distance of London. The opening sequence of Song of Summer was consequently filmed in the fields above Scarborough. He said he had always been lucky with his locations, and was always able to find somewhere suitable. Russell had wanted to produce a film on Delius for many years and had prepared various scripts, but it was not until he read Eric Fenby’s book Delius as I Knew Him that he found what he wanted. Incidentally, Russell considered Fenby’s work with Delius to be at the cost of Fenby’s own art; he felt that Delius had almost taken the musical life out of him, and that working with Delius prevented Fenby from becoming the composer he felt

DSJ 160 111 he could have been. Russell remarked that Song of Summer had an all-star cast. had not acted before but Russell saw his talent when he auditioned Gable for a part in another film which came to nothing. , Maureen Pryor and Christopher Gable all got together with Fenby who explained how he and Delius worked, by recreating scenes in which he played both Delius and himself. Russell recounts in his audio commentary how Fenby arrived on the set when Russell was filming the moment when Fenby met Delius for the first time. Fenby said it was exactly how it occurred all those years ago, and for Russell and the production team this was a great encouragement. Russell did not know how many people saw the film – it could have been as many as two or three million – and he did not know how many people knew about Delius’s music before they saw this film. The point for Russell is that this and his other films did cause viewers to become interested in these composers, and he was asked for years afterwards when the films would be shown again. When Russell first thought about making a film on Delius he was particularly interested in Delius’s early years in Florida, but it was impossible to film in Florida on the budget the BBC provided. Fenby’s book however, told the real story, and Russell started to think about using fantasy sequences, planning a whole sequence in pictures to show what Delius represented in Song of Summer. He travelled to the Lake District to prepare, but the plan came to nothing because of bad weather and the fact that they ran out of money. Russell realised that what was important was the relationship between Delius and Fenby – two very different characters – and how they worked to make music, and this is what the film is about. Russell likened his work to a detective story, as he explored the way in which the creative achievement came about. Russell did not make a film about a composer until he was saturated and filled with their art and this is particularly true for the Delius film. Russell made clear that all the dialogue in the film was as Fenby remembered it; nothing was invented. Some film biographies claim that they are based on a true story whereas Song of Summer is a true story. There is material in the film that was not in Delius as I Knew Him; Russell was able to include this after Fenby told him many anecdotes that he had not

112 DSJ 160 included in the book. Fenby remarked to Russell ‘if I told you everything you would be amazed.’ Christopher Gable understood his responsibility in playing Fenby and took great care not to put a foot wrong when the character he was playing was still living. Maureen Pryor and Max Adrian supported Gable in an interesting way by gently sending him up at dinner after the day’s work, with remarks such as ‘You are too serious, relax’. Russell suggests Gable was reflecting the earnestness of Fenby in the Delius household. The style of the compositions and actual shooting of the film just came automatically to Russell. He said that he just knew how he had to do the shot; there is only one way to line up the shot to convey in the simplest possible form the emotion of the scene. Russell remarked that ‘When you hear Delius’s music you know why both Fenby and Jelka Delius made the sacrifices they did.’ Russell was amazed at the vividness of Fenby’s recollections and all the sequences of Delius and Fenby at work are exactly as Fenby remembered them. When the film was finished Fenby saw it and then had a nervous breakdown, because the reality of the situation finally came home to him and shattered him. Fenby was unwell for a year after this. When we see Fenby with the score in Song of Summer, Russell had actually written on the score the dialogue alongside the notes: ‘it was as if we were writing an opera because it was all written down on the page. It is all there, what he says, what he writes and what he plays because it was so exact and so well remembered by Fenby.’ Russell indicated that the scene where Jelka speaks to Fenby about Delius’s affairs with other women was based on Fenby’s recollections, although this is not mentioned in Delius as I Knew Him. Russell remarks that the words in Delius’s Requiem where he speaks about the eternal renewal of creation echo Mahler’s The Song of the Earth. Russell believes Delius was inspired to write music by visual images. Fenby told Russell that he was at breaking point when he began to work on Songs of Farewell with Delius. Russell suggested that it must have taken great nerve and guts to criticise Delius; Fenby could have easily crumbled and gone back home rather than stand up to him. Monitor was subtitled Magazine of the Arts, so it covered a lot of ground. Whilst Russell was encouraged to make films about his interests, the films

DSJ 160 113 had to be straightforward and not esoteric, and enthuse the audience with as much excitement as the makers of the films felt whilst they were doing the job. The BBC certainly did not regard these films as being there for a minority audience. Russell considered the film not just to be about the working relationship of Delius and Eric Fenby, but wanted it to be seen as a work of art. He only made films about composers he really admired, and considered Song of Summer the best film he ever made: it says something about Delius as well showing how difficult creation is and how inspiring people can be in making another creative artistic contribution. It is remarkable that music is produced by this man who is paralysed, blind and who has great difficulty in communicating what he wants to write. So far we have heard Russell’s approach to the film from his audio commentary, and it might be interesting to contrast this with Fenby’s views which are given in an interview with Stephen Lloyd which first appeared in The Delius Society Journal (DSJ 89 pp14-23). Fenby recalls being ill throughout the whole filming, and saw the film for the first time at home [this contradicts the account on page 88 of Fenby on Delius (ed Lloyd) where Fenby describes visiting the set]. Elsewhere he has described Christopher Gable’s portrayal of himself as; ‘disturbingly lifelike’. In his interview he told Stephen Lloyd: ‘Had I ever been on the set, several things would have been quite different. Ken Russell was very anxious to be faithful to the script. Jelka would not have appeared slightly dotty, nor giggly in describing her mountain descent. She was a highly intelligent woman who came from a family of German diplomats, spoke several languages from childhood fluently, and was remarkably equable in character considering the sustained daily pressures on her. My father was portrayed without collar and tie playing chess. I never saw him without collar and tie; he was something of a dandy and couldn’t play chess. I was shocked when the scene with the priest was included for it is not in my book. Russell, like me, being a catholic, it was meant for his ears alone. Otherwise it was a remarkable representation’. Lastly it is interesting to see in an essay on Song of Summer contributed by Professor J C Tibbetts, included in the accompanying booklet for this box set, some background information regarding the film. We learn that Estelle

114 DSJ 160

Palmley, the secretary of the Delius Society in the mid-1960s wrote to Kenneth Adam, Director of Television at BBC Television Centre, suggesting that Delius’s ‘eventful life’ might be the subject of a BBC film. This had interested Russell, but he at first had some doubts, and indeed one of Delius’s nieces Mrs Vessey wrote to Russell raising objections to such a film. However any fears of an injunction stopping the film being shown were overridden and the producer Norman Swallow assured Russell that there was no fear of an injunction. I believe that Delians and other admirers of Russell’s work will agree that he succeeds very well with this film. I believe that we understand even more clearly what he aimed to achieve when we hear the audio commentary and I am sure all Delians will enjoy this reissue because of the extraordinary quality and achievement of Song of Summer and the additional items included with this and the other two films presented here.

Paul Chennell

DSJ 160 115

DELIUS SOCIETY MEETING REPORTS

BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY ANNUAL LECTURE Presented in collaboration with the Delius Society Sunday 13th March 2016 Swedenborg Hall, London

What follows is a short report of Professor Jeremy Dibble’s lecture, ‘Delius’s Norwegian and Danish songs: vehicles of stylistic experiment and change’, which was illustrated by live performances by baritone Milo Harries accompanied by Lucy Colquhoun. The full text of Jeremy Dibble’s lecture is reproduced on page 19.

Professor Jeremy Dibble began his lecture by taking his audience on a mini- tour of the Norway experienced by the young Delius. The country’s breath- taking scenery, the long summer light that spanned the night and the artistic community he kept company—most notably Edvard and Nina Grieg and Sinding—all played a part in shaping Delius’s musical language. It was an influence that was to last some forty or so years.

Milo Harries, winner of the British Music Society 2015 Song Competition, performed Delius songs as part of Jeremy Dibble’s annual lecture for the BMS.

116 DSJ 160

Throughout the lecture, the baritone, Milo Harries, accompanied by Lucy Colquhoun at the piano, illustrated a number of songs sung in both English and Norwegian. Dibble took time to explain key imagery and symbols within the poetry set by Delius, and made further comparison between the songs sung by Milo with piano accompaniment and recordings of the same music with orchestral accompaniment. By examining the Danish and Norwegian songs of the 1890s, Dibble was able to show the evolving harmonic language of Delius that transferred to his mature larger scale works such as A Mass of Life. We would like to thank both the BMS and Delius Society members who supported this event. One couple had travelled from Winchester; another gentleman booked his train ticket early in order to make a day trip from Somerset and others such as the international concert organist, Jennifer Bate, made the trek into town from Muswell Hill. Everyone was made welcome and showed their appreciation of Dibble’s insight and of Milo’s singing. Our thanks go to Karen Fletcher for helping to organise the generous supply of refreshments and to Dan Rootham for his virtuoso display of technological ability in assisting Professor Dibble with the presentation of the lecture.

Wendy Hiscocks

THE DELIUS PRIZE 2016 Adjudicator Bo Holten Wednesday 18th May 2016 David Josefowitz Recital Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London

Members who had attended the Delius symposium earlier in the day were joined by more in the evening to hear the finalists for the 2016 Delius Prize. Professor Timothy Jones, Deputy Principal of the Royal Academy, welcomed us before Roger Buckley thanked the Academy for continuing to host the event, and Bo Holten for agreeing to act as the Adjudicator. He noted that this was the 13th such competition, and observed that it continued to be an important stimulus for students to become aware of Delius, discover his works in the library and go on to perform them. Roger,

DSJ 160 117

Roger Buckley Peter Dieterling - Photo: Hans Photo:

The Euterpe Quartet (runners up) with adjudicator Bo Holten who had been instrumental in arranging the event, assisted Bo with his deliberations. The competition was open to piano, string and voice duos, and vocal or chamber ensembles. Entrants were required to perform a twenty-minute recital of their own choice consisting of works by Delius and his contemporaries. Once again we were treated to a series of high quality performances put across in professional style. Opening the programme was the Euterpe Quartet, a group of Academy students comprising violinists Sally and Sasha Gorski, violist Kim Becker and cellist Olivia da Costa. They are not to be confused with a New Zealand ensemble of the same name. Delius’s 1916 String Quartet provided a variety of tests from the brisk opening movements to the wistfulness of Late Swallows, which they passed with aplomb. Considering that the group was formed very recently, their first public performance being just a month earlier, they combined and communicated most effectively. Next we heard Delius’s Cello Sonata, given a most expressive performance by Charlotte Kaslin, accompanied by Antoine Préat. Both are prize winners in international competitions. They followed this with the

118 DSJ 160

first movement of Prokofiev’s 1949 Cello Sonata, which gave an opportunity for Charlotte to display a wide range of bowing techniques, compensating for the occasional false note. Third on the programme was another pair of prize-winners, the violinist Mari Wakasugi with last Winner, Joseph Havlat year’s recipient of the Delius Prize, Thomas Ang, at the piano. They played the relatively unfamiliar Violin Sonata in B, a piece reminiscent of Grieg, composed in 1892 but not published in Delius’s lifetime. Its rapturous first and third movements were delivered with polish by Mari although the performance was perhaps slightly lacking in expression. Thomas sportingly returned to act as page-turner for the last contender, the pianist Joseph Havlat, who was one of last year’s finalists. Intriguingly he had selected the rarely-heard Warlock arrangement of , and it came across as a very refreshing alternative to the orchestral version. Its reflective qualities were complemented by Two Pieces for Piano by John Ireland, which evoked a contrasting sort of quiet English lyricism. After an interval Bo Holten returned to announce his verdict. He began by referring to the idiosyncratic, modern, sometimes shocking quality of Delius. The definition of modern music can be debated ad infinitum, but his view was that Delius was so original that he would be forever modern. With that, the suspense was prolonged no more. In fourth place he commended Charlotte and Antoine, and Mari and Thomas were highly commended in third. Second prize went to the Euterpe Quartet and Joseph Havlat was awarded the first prize. Bo declared himself stunned by how well Joseph understood the music of Delius and, in particular, applauded his instinct for when to linger over key notes and when to brush them away, an aspect of the composer’s work that arose during the symposium earlier. Cheques for £1,000 and £500 were presented to their respective prize winners.

DSJ 160 119

We hope to see Joseph and indeed all the other artists performing Delius again, and reiterate our thanks to the Royal Academy of Music, Bo Holten and Roger Buckley, without whom this event would not have been possible.

Jim Beavis

DELIUS IN PERFORMANCE A symposium supported by the Delius Society and the AHRC Research Project, Delius Modernism and the Sound of Place

Wednesday 18th May 2016, 2.00-5.00pm David Josefowitz Recital Hall

The symposium was introduced by Professor Daniel Grimley. The following text is taken from the printed description of the event: Delius’s approach to notating his musical ideas, by comparison with contemporaries such as Edward Elgar or Jean Sibelius, often includes minimal details and performance directions. Beecham’s large number of revisions and changes to Delius’s manuscripts and printed scores were authorised by the composer, and have been incorporated into the Collected Works, painstakingly edited by Robert Threlfall, but still pose thorny problems of authenticity and realisation. Delius’s approach to writing for particular instruments (notoriously the piano, but also the violin), as well for voices, further raises intricate problems of idiom and technique. Delius’s music hence poses special challenges for performers, at various interpretative and practical levels, as well as offering wonderful opportunities for developing innovative approaches to programming and realisation. It is these challenges and opportunities that will be addressed in conversations this afternoon, in conjunction with the annual Delius Prize offered by the Delius Society in association with the Royal Academy of Music, as a means of celebrating and re-engaging Delius’s remarkable range of musical achievement and expression in its broadest sense. The speakers were Bo Holten – ‘Conducting Delius: Myths, Tales and North Country Sketches’, Anthony Gritten – ‘Delius, whoever he may be’, and Dan Grimley – ‘Chasing Late Swallows’. A report on Bo Holten’s talk, which

120 DSJ 160 relied heavily on recorded musical examples, follows. Anthony Gritten’s paper was presented in a revised version at the British Library Seminar on Friday 15th July 2016 and is reproduced on page 61. A revised version of Dan Grimley’s lecture is reproduced on page 37. [Ed]

Introduction Following his welcome and thanks to the Royal Academy of Music, the Delius Society and the Delius Trust, Professor Grimley explained that the symposium had been planned in response to inspiration which came from the 2012 Delius Study Weekend held in the British Library, with particular reference to the presentations by Paul Guinery on Delius’s piano music and Bo Holten who had spoken about the performance of Delius’s music. These sessions had prompted Dan Grimley to rethink completely his response to Delius’s music and how it should be played. Another inspiration was the current research which Dan is undertaking for his forthcoming book. He also mentioned the work of his research assistant Joanna Bullivant who is putting together a digital catalogue of Delius’s works which will hopefully be online from September 2016. The purpose of this catalogue is to conflate the existing hard copy catalogues of Delius’s music put together by Robert Threlfall and Rachel Lowe, and to make them available to the widest possible audience. This initiative has also allowed Dan to work closely with the British Library and its valuable holdings. Dan talked about the rich performance history of the works of Delius and the huge amount of material available: autograph scores, the sketches surrounding those scores, lesser known works, parts (whether they are in Delius’s hand or by copyists), recordings and critical reception. Unfortunately we don’t have a recording of Delius’s music conducted by the composer, but there is much on record from Beecham and various other conductors. It is clearly time for a reassessment of Beecham’s role as editor and conductor of Delius’s music, and the influence of Beecham since his death. Dan went on to say that other matters for us to consider include Delius’s idiosyncratic notation, how Delius writes his music and the relationship between the notation and what you are meant to play. This is not as straightforward as it might appear. There is a question of authenticity because of the use by Delius of amanuenses, and the status of

DSJ 160 121 scores needs consideration even before the amanuenses helped, because of questions of idiom and style and related problems of realisation and instrumentation. It would be interesting to consider the influence on performance of Delius’s scores if we used, for example, piston trombones, as found in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, rather than slide trombones, as they have a very different sound. We might also usefully consider what kind of Delius was using in a piece like The Song of the High Hills. These, and related questions, would be at the heart of our discussions, but they also leave many questions unanswered. Dan suggested the whole topic of realisation and editing of Delius’s music promises far more debates, arguments and disagreements than we could ever hope to explore in one afternoon. Finally Dan said it was a pleasure to be joined by two remarkable musicians, thinkers, performers and listeners: Professor Anthony Gritten of the Royal Academy of Music, and Bo Holten whose recordings have totally transformed the way he listens to Delius’s music.

Conducting Delius: Myths, Tales and North Country Sketches Bo Holten began by saying that it was with some trepidation that he spoke in front of such a distinguished group of Delians. He wanted to speak without notes and give us his inner-most feelings about conducting and playing Delius. It is always maintained with Delius that the essential thing to talk about is the flow – the momentum of the music. Bo Holten said that Delius’s music is rarely performed in Denmark, his home country, so he listens to a great many recordings. The thing about Delius’s flow is that it is very often mixed up with speed and going swiftly. Very often the music, as performed in the UK, becomes dull because it is hurried. Bo Holten’s initial viewpoint of Delius’s music is that it is often very virile music. In his view Delius is a very manly composer, but expressing oneself in a sensitive way and a very soft way can also be a very virile thing. He explained that virility has nothing to do with loud aggressive sound; it can also be quiet and subtle. He said that always with Delius one has to grab on to the music and then give it the expression it demands. Sometimes he gets the feeling that interpreters go into the music and express themselves in the music which happens to be by Delius. This composer – our composer – is such a sure composer that you have somehow to look into this strange mentality, this fantastically hedonistic

122 DSJ 160 man. We have all probably read the incredible letter written by Percy Grainger in 1941, in which he is talking about Delius and sex. This subject cannot be avoided because it is essential for understanding the music of Delius, which is very often only about sex: it is driven by pleasure; pleasure seeking above everything he does. Of course back in the 1960s and ‘70s there was a saying in this country: ‘No sex please, we’re British’. Bo had a feeling that one of the reasons why Delius is suffering in this country is there is a reluctance to talk about this. One always has to take a risk in playing Delius. Bo Holten went on to speak about The Song of the High Hills. He believes this piece has to do with climbing, and whereas some interpretations see the very opening as looking out and seeing the wide open spaces, he always feels that at the beginning of this work you feel the struggling is already there from the outset. A few seconds into the piece you can actually hear the climbing itself. Later in the piece you stop so you can actually imagine Delius and his friends climbing the Norwegian mountains. We then heard extracts from The Song of the High Hills and Bo Holten illustrated his points. The music is not suggesting landscape but the inner struggle of striving to climb the mountains. When conducting this music, Bo feels that Delius is always wanting one to change the tempo all the time: he doesn’t tell you in writing to go faster or slower, but the music itself tells you to use rubato. We then heard the beginning of Eventyr and Bo Holten explained and illustrated the importance of changing the speed of the music in this piece. We were asked to consider that some notes are longer than others, and this must be recognised and is typical of Delius’s musical prose. However, there are certain passages where the tempo should not change. Delius does not write any of this down; one simply has to read the music and understand it. Turning to North Country Sketches, Bo Holten said that this is one of the most difficult pieces by Delius to conduct because it seems to be (but, of course, is not) so incoherent. In the third movement, Dance, Delius lays emphasis on the second and third beats in the bar, never the first. This emphasis was demonstrated with various musical extracts – the second and third beats are what make the music dance. We heard how Dan Grimley had asked Bo Holten what he thought about A Mass of Life. Bo said that he has always wondered why the dance movements often sound so un-dancelike! Even Fenby says that Delius was

DSJ 160 123 a heavy dancer. Bo does not believe this is the case, instead attributing it to sloppy interpretation and not really observing anything but the first beat. Returning to North Country Sketches, Bo showed that if one rushes a passage from Dance it doesn’t swing at all. Bo said that, if he were a musicologist, he would like to compare the type of harmony on the first beat with that on the second beat. He said that few musicologists had dared to go into this, because it is very difficult to analyse Delius’s harmony – but one of the reasons we all love Delius’s music is the nature of its harmony. Today’s conducting style is for modern conductors to conduct ahead of the orchestra and this has always struck Bo Holten as very peculiar. He has watched films of Richard Strauss, Thomas Beecham and others from before the Second World War – you can see that they were always conducting exactly the same rhythm that the orchestra is playing. But after the Second World War somehow the tradition of Furtwangler and Karajan has spread over the whole of the western world, where the conductor gives indications to the orchestra in advance of what they are playing. It is a mystery how you can do this. But when orchestras are playing the same sixty works all the time, they know the music by heart and tend to look at the concert master rather than the conductor. If we were to conduct Delius in this way it would never have accents. We must remember that musicians will always play the first and the third beat just to stay together. Bo Holten thinks that we are in a position in musical life where the tradition is so old now that somehow western music stopped during the First World War in a sense, and everything that came after it is so different. There are no conductors living now who have known composers from early in the 20th century and the music is no longer new; as it is now the players and conductors are removed from the creators and we are recreating something for which we don’t really know what the tradition is. When we hear the Beecham recordings, especially the early ones, we hear music that Beecham knew very well; Beecham simply knows how this music should go, he knew what this was all about. But somehow this has disappeared today, which is very depressing because we are, he thinks, in a time where we are trying to recreate something which is lost, partly because of the terrible events of the twentieth century. Artists have reacted to the music of the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. This is perfectly understandable but this is why it is almost impossible to interpret Delius today. If somehow we could spread the word that conductors should stop

124 DSJ 160 conducting ahead of the orchestra and accept that Delius should actually dance much more we could encourage liveliness and virility, and not have this purely atmospheric approach. The music has got to be firm, crisp and strong.

Paul Chennell 

DSJ 160 125

MISCELLANY

A VILLAGE ROMEO AND JULIET With the support of the Delius Trust, New Sussex Opera is touring a new production of A Village Romeo and Juliet to five venues in Sussex, Kent and the Cadogan Hall in March/April 2017. Lee Reynolds will conduct the NSO Chorus with the Kantanti Ensemble as the orchestra. The director is Susannah Waters, who directed Chabrier’s L’Étoile for NSO in 2013 (‘twice as enjoyable’ as the more recent production at Covent Garden according to Rupert Christiansen). Soloists include Luke Sinclair as Sali, Kirsty Taylor- Stokes as Vrenchen and Ian Beadle as The Dark Fiddler. Lee Reynolds writes ‘The primary reason I was attracted to this opera was the chance to explore the question of what could drive these two lovers, across the course of the opera, to take their own lives. The intoxicating music clearly paints their infatuation with one another, in the face of the escalating stakes and social pressure in Act 2. Together, this makes for a very compelling and human story’. In fact, the opera has been on NSO’s ‘wish list’ for many years, and the group is excited that the support of the Trust is finally enabling them to fulfil that wish, aiming, in the words of Sir Thomas Beecham, ‘to perform that baffling miracle, squaring the circle’. Because of the large number of instruments for which Delius writes, the work has usually been performed in very large opera houses. Yet, as Beecham said, ‘The characters are frail and intimate creatures who cannot bawl their emotions with gusto – they are almost dream creatures who wander on and off stage as in a fairy-tale. In a large building they are out of focus and their identities wither, as would those of The Wild Duck or The Cherry Orchard in the vast auditoriums of La Scala or the Met. A structure of moderate dimensions is the first requisite for dramatic effectiveness, where the actors are not dwarfed by the surroundings.’ With this new production designed for small to medium sized venues, NSO hopes audiences will be captivated by the immediacy of this most poignant and moving of works. New Sussex Opera was founded in Lewes in 1978. It is a community based company with the chorus at its heart. An expert but unpaid team does the administration and behind the scenes work. Professionals and

126 DSJ 160 enthusiasts work together to present imaginative, high quality productions, usually of unjustly neglected or lesser-known works. UK premieres have included operas by Weill, Tchaikovsky, von Einem, Offenbach and Puccini. More information about these and NSO’s forthcoming productions can be found at www.newsussexopera.org.

CONFERENCES IN GREZ AND TORBAY Readers may be interested in two conferences coming up this autumn: in Grez-sur-Loing on 11th-13th November and Torbay on 18th-21st November. Our President, Dr Lionel Carley, will be speaking at both. Details of the Grez weekend were given in the last newsletter, but are included here again as a reminder. The event is entitled ‘Les Colonies Artistiques de Grez’ (‘The Artist Colonies of Grez’), and will include lectures, an exhibition, a concert and visits to various local places of interest. Lionel Carley’s presentation is entitled ‘Frederick Delius and Jelka Rosen’. Full details including an application form are available via the website http://artistes-grezsurloing.fr or by post from Artistes du Bout du Monde, 14, rue de Larchant, 77880 Grez-sur-Loing, France. Tel: 01 64 45 61 41 and email: [email protected]. The Torbay weekend, organised by the Friends of Torbay and held at the Palace Hotel, features talks on a variety of musical subjects from a range of speakers including Jonathan Maw, Meurig Bowen and James Jolly. Lionel Carley’s presentation explains how the lives of Grieg, Delius, and Grainger became closely entwined despite them being seemingly such diverse composers. More information can be obtained from John Isaac on 01580 879359 or by email from Gillian Babbs at [email protected]. Alternatively, visit the website at www.fot.org.uk.

DSJ 160 127

GRAHAM GREENE AND DELIUS Whilst reading Graham Greene’s novel Stamboul Train, John Fawcett noticed an interesting reference to Delius. This occurs in Part 2 of the novel, on page 81 of the Heinemann/Bodley Head edition. The character described is an assassin who is bayoneted to death after failing to murder another character in the book. The assassin is described as being ‘left handed and a lover of Delius’s music, the melancholy, idealistic music of a man without a faith in anything but death ...’ Delius doesn’t appear to be mentioned anywhere else in the book.

AN ANTHONY PAYNE PROMS PREMIERE

Roger Buckley writes:

BBC Prom 15 on 26th July 2016 included the world premiere of a major new work, Of Land, Sea and Sky, set for chorus and orchestra, by Delius Society Vice President Anthony Payne. The BBC Symphony Chorus and the BBC Symphony Orchestra were conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. At a pre- performance interview by Andrew McGregor in the Imperial College Union (just around the corner from the Royal Albert Hall), in the context of an 80th birthday review of his life’s work, as well as in the evening’s programme note, Tony Payne accounted for the origin of the piece. One of its influences (or ‘illusions’, as Tony called them) was the memory of a film showing wild white horses of the Camargue racing through the turning tide in the Rhône estuary; another was Roy Campbell’s poem ‘Horses on the Camargue’. Other ideas flowed from an incident in a novel by Joseph Conrad and from the Australian artist Arthur Streeton’s 1919 painting of the Somme valley, a peaceful landscape with clouds that could also represent the smoke of battle. Whitman was another powerful influence. These ‘illusions’ engendered a six-movement composition, plus Prelude and Postlude, to words of Tony’s own devising. At time of writing, the 28- minute performance can still be heard on the BBC website at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/ehmwhn#p042qz34

128 DSJ 160

The concert programme was a strong one and as such a perfect vehicle for Tony Payne’s new work. It opened with Tchaikovsky’s thrilling Symphonic Fantasy The Tempest (in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare). Asked about its placing after the Tchaikovsky, Tony commented that his work, too, contains a storm sequence towards the end. In the second half we had a brilliant rendition of Bruch’s first Violin Concerto by the Taiwan-born Ray Chen, followed by a performance of Vaughan Williams’s first significant large-scale choral work, Toward the Unknown Region. RVW, like Delius, Holst and many other composers was an admirer of Whitman (he said of Whitman’s poetry: ‘I’ve never got over him, I’m glad to say’), and chose to set the poet’s resonant and affirmative words in a piece that has become recognised as a true masterpiece of the 20th century.

ERIC FENBY Tom Woolley visited Eric Fenby’s grave in Scalby, Yorkshire, in June 2016, and kindly sent in this picture.

Tom Woolley Tom Photo:

Eric Fenby’s grave, St Laurence’s Church, Scalby

DSJ 160 129

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

From Stephen Lloyd:

Two mysteries solved? Tully Potter was rightly surprised that there should still be speculation concerning the conductor of the 1929 recording of Sea Drift (Letters to the Editor, DSJ Spring 2016 p125), but the mystery was solved much earlier than Tully Potter’s 1998 article in International Classical Collector. As they say, you heard (or read) it first here, in The Delius Society Journal. In August 1986 I interviewed Roy Henderson at his home in London and, as then editor of the Delius Society Journal, I included a summary of our conversation in a special issue of the Journal that was dedicated to Henderson (Winter 1987, number 92). There he not only clearly stated that Anthony Bernard was the conductor of that Sea Drift recording in which Henderson was the soloist, but most interestingly he explained how the then unissued Beecham recordings of An Arabesque and Songs of Sunset from the 1934 Leeds Festival came about, and surprisingly he also revealed that he and Dora Labbette had rehearsed the Idyll with Sir Thomas in Dora’s flat for the work’s first performance in 1933 under Sir at . In April 1989 I invited Roy Henderson as a guest speaker to the Society at the British Music Information Centre, and on that occasion he repeated much of the above information. In a much later issue of the Journal (Spring 2006, number 1391), devoted largely to Sea Drift, I outlined the history surrounding the 1929 Decca Sea Drift recording and how at that time Anthony Bernard had also recorded for the Brunswick label North Country Sketches and Air and Dance. Because of some defects these last two works were put down for re-recording, but sadly that never took place and the test pressings do not seem to have survived. At the time of Decca’s 50th anniversary celebrations a single-sided LP containing Sea Drift only was pressed and Roy Henderson received a copy. It is evident that even then there was confusion over the conductor because, as Henderson told me, the label incorrectly bore the name of Stanley Chapple. Despite the various faults of this 1929 recording, it is surely of sufficient interest to be issued on CD - if only for its historical value.

130 DSJ 160

On another matter, in the Spring issue of the Journal, in his interesting article on North Country Sketches, John France perhaps understandably finds the work’s dedication to a mystery when Beecham gave its first performance in 1915. For much of 1920 until 1923 Beecham had withdrawn from the concert world and in his absence Albert Coates was a prominent conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s concerts. These included the premières of The Song of the High Hills (1920) and the Requiem (1922), both under Coates. In addition Coates gave performances for the RPS of Appalachia (1921) – in Delius’s words ‘a wonderful performance’, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1921), The Song of the High Hills again (1922) and the Piano Concerto (1923). He had even hoped to give a second performance of the Requiem but this came to nothing. (Much later he was to conduct Songs of Farewell.) So when North Country Sketches was published in 1923 it is perhaps not so surprising to find that it is dedicated to Coates, quite likely in recognition of his championing of Delius. Coates did not of course please everyone: at a shared LSO concert in October 1919 he famously incurred Elgar’s wrath by robbing him of valuable rehearsal time for the first performance of the Cello Concerto.

Stephen Lloyd

1 Both the Journal issues referred to in this letter can be accessed on the Delius Society website at www.delius.org.uk/pastjournals.htm

From Stewart Manville, to David Eccott:

As a member of the Grainger household for more than half a century and husband of Percy’s widow Ella during her culminating years, not infrequently I overheard or participated in conversations likely to reflect musical history. Ella and the Jacksonville ladies took Fred’s Florida love relationship as quite to be expected but felt that the child’s mother did the right thing in not permitting its life to be disrupted. That his former sweetheart should disappear into her community was understandable for any number of additional reasons. If she had meanwhile found a husband, what then?

DSJ 160 131

The idea of Delius descendants still around and about somewhere down south does, indeed, intrigue me. What became of Madama Butterfly’s little boy, as well? PS David, as to Koanga, Ella and I attended the performances given at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC, a good many years ago. The libretto impressed me as very good, so I have always been puzzled by contrary opinions expressed when the work has been presented elsewhere or recorded. Did Washington have an improved or somehow otherwise superior book? If you are aware of my years writing reviews for OPERA, you know I’m a practiced listener (the world premier of Magic Fountain was one of my assignments).

Stewart Manville

From Tony Summers:

David Eccott’s recent article about Delius’s ‘lost child’ (DSJ 159, p70) raises interesting questions as to how widely known was Delius’s Florida affair since the subject is conspicuously absent from the standard Delius biographies and much other Delius literature but it has surprised me to see it mentioned in an unexpected place – a biography of DH Lawrence. Philip Heseltine knew both Delius and Lawrence and, at Heseltine’s suggestion, Lawrence briefly considered settling in Delius’s abandoned Florida plantation. The idea came to nothing but when the Florida idea appears in Harry T Moore’s biography of Lawrence1 there is a quite casual mention of Delius’s mistress Chloe as though it’s common knowledge (p 262): ‘But perhaps Delius has no wish to let the Priest of Love take over the plantation that stood in the jungle, with warping shutters and collapsing roofs, like a symbol of the broken, lost love of one’s youth – in Delius’s case the quadroon girl Chloe.’ Where did Moore get his information? There are many possibilities and perhaps readers know the answer? In his article David Eccott points out that Grainger first went public about the Florida mistress as early as 1934 but as this was in a musical journal it’s unlikely that this was Moore’s source. Heseltine and Cecil Gray surely knew, and as both knew Lawrence, it’s quite possible that he knew as well. It’s therefore possible that the subject is mentioned in correspondence between these three that Moore had

132 DSJ 160 seen. Moore’s biography appeared in 1955 – it’s also possible, therefore, that he had discussed Lawrence earlier with Cecil Gray (who died in 1951) but Gray’s name does not feature in the Acknowledgements chapter of the book. Yet another possible source is the writer Richard Aldington whose Lawrence biography2 preceded Moore’s. Aldington knew both Lawrence and Gray, and Moore mentions him in his introduction as an important source of material, though interestingly Aldington’s biography doesn’t mention Delius’s mistress. This is of course all speculation but it does lead me to the view that, despite denials that it ever happened3, knowledge of Delius’s affair was probably widespread in the musical and literary world but most chose to keep quiet about it. I would welcome any further information from DSJ readers on this fascinating subject.

Tony Summers

1 The Intelligent Heart – The Story of DH Lawrence by Harry T Moore, Penguin Books Ltd 1960 (first published by Farrar, Strauss & Young, 1955) 2 Portrait of a Genius, But ... by Richard Aldington, Heinemann, 1951 3 As discussed in David Eccott’s article, DSJ No 159, Spring 2016, pp 70-89

David Eccott responds: I was very grateful to receive letters from Stuart R Manville, husband of Percy Grainger’s widow Ella, and Tony Summers regarding my article ‘The Lost Child Revisited’ (DSJ 159, Spring 2016). Both letters contained some very interesting points which I would like briefly to discuss. Firstly, Stewart Manville provides a very important detail when he says that ‘Ella and the Jacksonville ladies took Fred’s Florida love relationship as quite to be expected …’. The term ‘Jacksonville ladies’ suggests that the affair was common knowledge amongst the Jacksonville community at the time that it was taking place. At the very least it implies that the events were performed within living memory and were not, as some have argued, merely a tall story concocted by Delius who, according to Don C Gillespie and others, had an amazing ability to invent stories on the spot, presumably for the sheer wanton hell of it, and which were subsequently related to Percy Grainger who, due to an alleged gullible streak in his character, immediately accepted them without question or interrogation; an accusation for which those who have

DSJ 160 133 perpetrated it, continually fail to provide even one iota of evidence in corroboration. The truth of the matter is that Delius’s affair was very likely common knowledge in Jacksonville at the time when he was there. I did respond to Stewart Manville, and asked him if he could remember anything else that might be important or relevant. He replied by saying that although there wasn’t anything specific to augment his initial letter, in the course of their daily dialogue, he and Ella ‘would come around to the subject of how great love can serve as a progenitor of great art.’ He went on to say that Ella felt that ‘a chief characteristic of Fred’s work is yearning’, and that they were of a mind that Delius’s ‘Florida love must have been deep and abiding in the profound way it manifested itself musically.’ Stewart told me that he and Ella ‘speculated further that the relationship must, for whatever reason, have experienced an unsatisfactory termination, thus heightening its poignancy.’ Stewart also said that, based on the historic situation of those times, his personal feeling ‘recognizes first of all that marriage would have been forbidden; and the young lady’s community of respectable church-going black citizens were not going to let her revert to the antebellum plantation ways.’ Mr Manville concluded his letter by saying that ‘without this alleged “Chloe” there might not have materialized that emotional state from which such exquisite Delian beauty arose, nor conditions serving to further heighten its sublime qualities.’ This is certainly a point worth strongly bearing in mind because, as I said in my original article, without this affair, we may not have had Delius as we know him. I may be wrong, but the fact that Mr Manville writes ‘alleged “Chloe” ’ suggests to me that there might possibly have been some conundrum over the girl’s actual name. Readers may well recall that I discussed this particular aspect of the case at some length in my article, stressing that I couldn’t find the name Chloe, let alone any verification of it, in any of the published literature on Delius. I mentioned that Tasmin Little, in her BBC TV documentary The Lost Child, says that ‘upon reading more, I found out that this girl was called Chloe’, but we were never told precisely where this information derived from, nor was I able to find the actual source for myself. For that reason, I was extremely surprised when Tony Summers provided a passage from a book, totally removed from the professional literature surrounding Delius, where the name Chloe actually appears in print.

134 DSJ 160

I was aware that D H Lawrence had considered settling in Delius’s abandoned Florida plantation, but I had never read Harry T Moore’s biography of D. H. Lawrence. However, as can be seen from the quote that Tony provides, the name Chloe confidently and assertively appears in the correct context. As Tony Summers says, it appears as though it is common knowledge. Furthermore, the fact that it appears in a book, the subject matter of which is totally unrelated to Delius is, in itself, virtual verification that this was indeed the name of Delius’s Florida mistress. Tony makes a number of suggestions as to where Moore may have gleaned his information from, but I would also be interested to know if anyone else can shed any further light on the matter. In any event, it would seem that whatever Tasmin Little’s source was, it was accurate, at least according to Harry T Moore. So, was Moore the actual basis of Tasmin’s Little’s information? Who knows? So far, none of those involved in the documentary have come forward to clarify the matter. Or is there another, yet undisclosed source that provided the necessary information, possibly for both Moore and Little? In conclusion, I would certainly agree with Tony Summers when he says that ‘despite denials that it ever happened, knowledge of Delius’s affair was probably widespread in the musical and literary world, but most chose to keep quiet about it.’ Although we still do not have unequivocal proof that the affair happened, there is abundant evidence to strongly suggest, if not confirm that it did. Yet, even now, there will still be those that will turn a blind eye to it, or dismiss it as being some kind of exotic fantasy, whilst probably knowing full well that quite the opposite is true. It all rather begs the question as to what may be being withheld as if it were ‘something nasty in the woodshed.’

David Eccott 

DSJ 160 135

From Tony Watts:

Marc Hofstadter, in his letter (DSJ 159), would like to know why (and if) readers agree with him in considering Delius to be a ‘special’ composer. I would like to have a go at answering Marc’s question. The ‘if’ part of the question is easy to answer: yes, Delius has always been special as far as I’m concerned; in fact, since the age of fourteen I’ve considered there to be basically two kinds of music: Delius and ‘the rest’. The ‘why’ part of the question is more difficult. I suppose all great composers are special in their own way, so we must consider in what ways, if any, Delius is unique. Marc suggests four aspects of the man and his music that can be considered reasons for regarding him as ‘special’. The first of these is that he is under-appreciated. I don’t think this in itself qualifies as a reason because I’m sure there must be many other under-appreciated composers, though I can’t think of any cases that show such a mismatch between the inspirational quality of the music and the frequency of its performance. Turning from the music to the man, Marc cites the moving story of how Delius overcame blindness and paralysis to compose, with Eric Fenby’s help, a number of important works. Marc can think of no other composer who achieved so much against such odds, and neither can I, even though most people are far more familiar with the story of Beethoven working against the odds of his increasing deafness. The last two aspects Marc considers are the ‘emotionality’ and ‘beauty’ of Delius’s music and these are the qualities I would like to dwell on, because these are what really set him apart as far as I am concerned. I’d like to consider these two qualities together, because I don’t think they can be realistically separated: the beauty and the emotion are the same thing. Beauty in this music is not the formal beauty that is found in art of the classical period, or that which mathematicians see in a theorem or physicists in an equation. It is more like the wild, capricious beauty of a spring morning or an autumn landscape. And that brings us to another quality, which Marc didn’t mention – its deep connection to nature. Listening to Delius can be like walking or cycling in the country – his ‘melody of harmonies’ feels like the ever changing complexions of the natural world – the movement of cloud shadows, the play of light on water. And it’s not

136 DSJ 160 just superficially ‘descriptive’ music. Like Wordsworth, Delius heard in nature ‘the still sad music of humanity’. Much has been made of Delius’s ‘atheism’ and indeed his temperament was deeply at odds with the respectable Victorian religiosity he was brought up with, and yet his music is profoundly spiritual. Like Wordsworth again, he felt ‘…a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man -- A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.’ In trying to verbalise the emotional quality of Delius’s music, words like ‘dreamy’, ‘nostalgia’, transience’, ‘longing’ are often used. ‘Fair enough’ I think – then I put on a recording of Delius and it very soon becomes apparent how far those words are from doing it justice. For Delius reaches parts that no other composer, or indeed poet, has ever been able to reach before or since. There is an area of the emotional spectrum that is available only to Delius and to those of us who are lucky enough to have discovered his music. That is why he is special.

Tony Watts 

From Tony Noakes

Thank you for DSJ 159. I particularly enjoyed ‘The cuckoo and other birds’. It always puzzled me that only three seasons were portrayed in North Country Sketches. And then it occurred to me that Song of Summer, also with a Yorkshire inspiration, could be regarded as a fifth North Country Sketch. I have just enjoyed playing it on my CDs as a sequel to the original Sketches. ‘The lost child’ will, I fear, never be found, but my wife and I remember the dismay of the Southern ladies at the 1999 Jacksonville Delius Festival,

DSJ 160 137 at which Tasmin Little presented her researches. Surely ‘their’ composer couldn’t really have had a coloured mistress …! I may be only a naturalized Australian, but I can't let Martin Lee- Browne’s description of Percy Grainger as an Englishman (DSJ 159 p42) pass without comment! I have only recently got to know the Caprice and Elegy, and, minor work though it may be, it has become one of my favourites. The tune of the Caprice has become a welcome earworm. It also resembles the ironical duet ‘You must meet my wife’ in Sondheim’s Little Night Music – influence or coincidence? I was glad to see the Caprice and Elegy on the programme of the current English Music Festival. I have been enviously admiring this Festival from a distance of 10,000 miles, in the same way that I miss DS meetings. Nevertheless I love it here in Perth, and would be delighted to meet any DS members whose travels take them this way.

Tony Noakes

138 DSJ 160

FORTHCOMING EVENTS

DELIUS SOCIETY LONDON BRANCH

Tuesday 11th October 2016 at 7.15pm Lewis Foreman introduces his most recent book – Felix Aprahamian: Diaries and Selected Writings on Music National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE (Nearest tube: Embankment or Waterloo)

Refreshments will be provided. Supper afterwards (at own cost) at a restaurant to be confirmed.

Saturday 5th November 2016 at 3.00pm Sir Charles Groves – a post-centenary tribute by Stephen Lloyd A celebration of Sir Charles’s life and championing of (chiefly) British music, illustrated mainly with extracts from broadcasts of works that he did not record commercially. The Barrister’s Court, Browns, St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4AG (Nearest tube: Leicester Square or Charing Cross)

Refreshments will be provided. Supper afterwards (at own cost) in Browns Restaurant.

Wednesday 24th May 2017 (time tbc) The Villiers Quartet launch their new CD featuring the original version of Late Swallows. Professor Daniel Grimley will speak about Late Swallows, and the Quartet will play live extracts. National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE (Nearest tube: Embankment or Waterloo)

Refreshments will be provided. Supper afterwards (at own cost) at a restaurant to be confirmed.

Full details of all events can always be found on The Delius Society website: www.delius.org.uk/forthcomingevents.htm

DSJ 160 139

OTHER EVENTS This section may include events which are in the past by the time the Journal is read; their inclusion is deliberate so that we have in print a complete record of all performances. Venues of non-UK concerts are in upper case. Before travelling to events listed here, you are advised to confirm the details with the relevant box office.

Friday 6th and Saturday 7th May 2016 at 8.00pm TOBIN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS Delius (arr Beecham): The Walk to the Paradise Garden Bizet: Symphony in C Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No 2 Franck: Le Chasseur maudit Martina Filjak piano San Antonio Symphony Orchestra Akiko Fujimoto conductor

Friday 15th July 2016 at 6.30pm St Pancras Church, Euston Rd, NW1 Elgar and Delius: Music for Violin and Piano Delius: Sonata no 3 for Violin and Piano Delius: Légende Elgar: Sonata for Violin and Piano Clare Wheeler violin Suzy Ruffles piano This concert followed the symposium at the British Library

140 DSJ 160

Saturday 16th July 2016 at 7.30pm Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, London SW1X 9BZ Into the Twilight: Romantic choral music from the fringes of Europe Delius: To be sung of a summer night on the water Toivo Kuula: Auringon noustessa (Sunrise); Siell on kauan jo kukkineet omenapuut (Yonder the apple trees have long been in bloom) Ireland: The Peaceful Western Wind Moeran: Under the Greenwood Tree; The River-God’s Song from Songs of Springtime Grieg: Våren (Last Spring) Elgar: As Torrents in Summer from Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf Leevi Madetoja: Voi, jos ilta joutuisi (O if Evening soon would fall) Elgar: Evening Scene Stenhammar: September Norwegian folksong (arr Eyvind Alnæs): Jeg lagde mig så sildig (I lay down so late) Toivo Kuula: Nuku (Sleep) Sibelius: Drömmarna (Dreaming) Ireland: Twilight Night The Carice Singers George Parris director (The Carice Singers will release a disc of Delius choral works on Naxos in 2017)

Saturday 16th July 2016 at 7:30pm Beatrice Harrison: 50th Anniversary Memorial Concert Park, , RH19 3QE Frederick Delius: Cello Sonata Ludwig van Beethoven: Cello Sonata in D, Op 102, No 2 John Ireland: Cello Sonata Alexander Glazunov: Chant du Ménéstral Cyril Scott: Pierrot amoureux Folk song arrangements: Roger Quilter/Laurence Brown/Herbert Hughes Adrian Bradbury cello Oliver Davies piano

DSJ 160 141

Wednesday 27th July 2016 at10.30am St Mary de Lode Church, Gloucester Three Choirs Festival Gloster Gossip: 300 years of Gloucester Meetings in Image, Word, & Music The Wulstan Atkins Lecture Anecdotes from the past 300 years of Three Choirs Festivals in Gloucester create the narrative framework for this portrait of some of the characters who have walked these streets before us including Frederick Delius, who in 1925 struggled to hear a radio broadcast of one of his pieces in his home at Grez-sur-Loing in deepest France. Musical illustrations included excerpts from: John Okeover: Grant we beseech thee; Purcell: Jubilate in D major; Handel: Alexander’s Feast; Maurice Greene: Florimel or Love’s Revenge Arthur Bliss: The Beatitudes and works by John Stafford Smith, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Kodály, Finzi and more. Quentin Letts narrator Gabrielle Bullock, Paul Feldwick, Katharine O’Carroll, Roger Thorn, Philip Vaughan, Stephen Williams speakers Vicki Field soprano Ensemble Sine Nomine Sebastian Field conductor

Thursday 15th September 2016 at 1.00pm New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester Leicester International Music Festival Delius: Late Swallows Watkins: Dream; Bowen: Oboe Sonata Op.85 Vaughan Williams: Phantasy Quintet Carducci String Quartet Nicholas Daniel oboe Giovanni Guzzo violin Chen Halevi clarinet Katya Apekisheva piano Philip Dukes viola

142 DSJ 160

Tuesday 30th September 2016 at 7.30pm St George’s Chapel, Windsor Windsor Festival – Romeo and Juliet through music Berlioz: Overture Béatrice et Bénédict Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet Suite No 1 Delius: The Walk to the Paradise Garden Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story Orpheus Sinfonia Thomas Carroll conductor

Sunday 9th October 2016 at 6:45pm The Elgar Room, Royal Albert Hall A celebration of British Opera Extracts from operas by Vaughan Williams, Delius (, Koanga) and Dame Ethel Smyth Ben Johnson tenor, Mark Stone baritone Opera Holland Park

Monday 10th October 2016 at 1:00pm The Music Room, Philharmonic Hall, Myrtle Street, Liverpool L1 9BP Delius: Sonata for Cello and Piano Bridge: Sonata for Cello and Piano; Four Pieces for Cello and Piano Liubov Ulybysheva cello John Paul Ekins piano

Monday 10th October 2016 at 8:00pm Luton Music Club, Central Library, St George’s Square, Luton LU1 2NG Delius (arr Warlock): On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring Delius (arr Heseltine): Dance Rhapsody No 1 Warlock (arr Wilschau): Capriol Suite; Rachmaninov (arr Wilschau): Symphony No 2 Parnassius Duo: Simon Callaghan and Hiroaki Takenouchi pianos

DSJ 160 143

Tuesday 25th October 2016 at 3.30pm New Lecture Theatre, Birmingham Conservatoire Public Research Seminar: Delius Deep South Professor Daniel Grimley The importance of America in the life and music of Frederick Delius (1862– 1934) has been widely recognised. Many scholars have pointed to the impact of African-American music upon his later compositional development. In this talk Professor Grimley (Fellow and Tutor in Music at Merton College, Oxford) will reassess the quality and significance of such influence in the context of the deeply racialised landscapes of the American south, and ask what it might mean for a more critically engaged response to Delius’s work. Tickets £4 at the door

Sunday 6th November 2016 at 2.30pm Stanley Library, Girton College, Cambridge Delius (arr ): Sonata No 3 for violin and piano David Earl: Sonata for viola and piano Carol Hubel-Allen viola Alan MacLean piano Supported by the Delius Trust

Friday 11th - Sunday 13th November 2016 Grez-sur Loing, France Les Colonies Artistiques de Grez (The Artist Colonies of Grez) A conference which will include lectures, an exhibition, a concert and visits to various local places of interest. Lionel Carley will speak on ‘Frederick Delius and Jelka Rosen’. http://artistes-grezsurloing.fr Artistes du Bout du Monde, 14, rue de Larchant, 77880 Grez-sur-Loing Tel: 01 64 45 61 41 Email: [email protected]

144 DSJ 160

Saturday 12th November 2016 at 7.30 pm Cornerstone, Didcot OX11 7NE Delius: The Walk to the Paradise Garden Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet Suite No 2; Gounod: Romeo et Juliette Ballet Music; Tchaikowsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture St Giles Orchestra Geoffrey Bushell conductor

Sunday 13th November 2016 at 3.00pm GERMAN SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 611 SPRING GARDEN STREET, PHILADELPHIA PA 19123 Delius Society 40th Anniversary Concert and WWI Memorial Delius: Requiem (with 4-hand piano accompaniment) Vaughan Williams: Five Mystical Songs; Elgar: ‘For the Fallen’ from The Spirit of England Singers from Choral Arts Philadelphia Matthew Glandorf conductor

Friday 18th – Monday 21st November 2016 Palace Hotel, Torbay Torbay Musical Weekend: talks on a variety of musical subjects from Jonathan Maw, Meurig Bowen, James Jolly, Lionel Carley and others. Lionel Carley speaks on the lives of Grieg, Delius, and Grainger and how they became closely entwined despite being seemingly so diverse. www.fot.org.uk Tel: John Isaac 01580 879359; Email: [email protected]

Saturday 26th November 2016 at 7.30pm St John’s Evangelical Church, Oxford Supported by the Delius Trust Delius: Violin Sonata Op post; Debussy: Violin Sonata in G minor; Franck: Violin Sonata in A major; Saint-Saëns: Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso Op 28 Sophie Rosa violin Sholto Kynoch piano

DSJ 160 145

Thursday 1st December 2016 at 7.30pm St David’s Hall, Cardiff Elgar: Overture In the South (Alassio) Delius: Double Concerto Walton: Belshazzar’s Feast Tasmin Little violin Paul Watkins cello Neal Davies bass BBC National Chorus of Wales BBC National Orchestra of Wales Martyn Brabbins conductor

Saturday 3rd December 2016 at 7.30pm Macclesfield Heritage Centre Winter Wonders Britten: Simple Symphony Delius: Serenade from Hassan Finzi: In terra pax Dvorák: Slavonic Dances Debussy: La Neige Danse Gershwin: Songs Shostakovich: Waltzes and Polka Alison Langer soprano, Northern Chamber Orchestra Ian Crawford conductor Concert supported the Delius Trust and the Finzi Trust

Friday 17th and Saturday 18th February 2017 at 7.30pm Sunday 19th February 2017 at 2.00pm SYMPHONY HALL, PHOENIX, ARIZONA Delius: The Walk to the Paradise Garden Britten: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings Vaughan Williams: Symphony No 5 Paul Appleby tenor, Cassie Walck horn Phoenix Symphony Orchestra James Feddeck conductor

146 DSJ 160

Monday 20th February 2017 at 7:30pm Luton Music Club, Central Library, St George’s Square, Luton LU1 2NG Delius (arr Warlock): On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring Delius: Aquarelles; Delius (arr Heseltine): Dance Rhapsody No 1 Chiquinha Gonzaga: Gaucho Rachmaninov (arr Wilschau): Symphony No 2 Parnassius Duo: Simon Callaghan and Hiroaki Takenouchi pianos

Saturday 4th March 2017 at 7.00pm Bournemouth Pavilion, Bournemouth Goldmark: Overture – In the Spring Delius: On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring Delius: Summer Night on the River Vivaldi: The Four Seasons: Concerto in E major, ‘La Primavera’ (Spring) Vivaldi: The Four Seasons: Concerto in G minor, ‘L’estate’ (Summer) Copland: Suite – Appalachian Spring Bernstein: On the Town – Three Dance Episodes Clio Gould violin Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra Victor Aviat conductor

Friday 17th March 2017 at 8.00pm MAISON DE RADIO FRANCE: STUDIO 104, PARIS Delius: Deux chansons pour chœur Vaughan Williams: Folk Songs of the Four Seasons Dvořák: Mass in D major Version I (soli, mixed choir, org) Chœur de Radio France Maîtrise de Radio France Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France Sofi Jeannin conductor

DSJ 160 147

Friday 24th March 2017 at 7.30pm The Hexagon, Reading Delius: On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring Vivaldi: Concerto for Violin and Strings No 1 in E, ‘Spring’ from Le Quattro Stagioni, (The Four Seasons) Op 8 Coates: Springtime Grainger: Country Gardens Vaughan Williams: Overture The Wasps Elgar: Chanson de Matin Johann Strauss: Fruhlingsstimmen (Voices of Spring) Op 410 City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Julian Wilkins conductor Ann-Marie Minhall presenter

Friday 31st March 2017 at 7.30pm Symphony Hall, Birmingham Delius: On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring Vivaldi: Concerto for Violin and Strings No 1 in E, ‘Spring’ from Le Quattro Stagioni, (The Four Seasons) Op 8 Coates: Springtime Grainger: Country Gardens Vaughan Williams: Overture The Wasps Elgar: Chanson de Matin Johann Strauss: Fruhlingsstimmen (Voices of Spring) Op 410 CBSO Children’s Chorus City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Julian Wilkins conductor Ann-Marie Minhall presenter

Thursday 6th April 2017 at 8.00pm LA MAISON SYMPHONIQUE DE MONTRÉAL, MONTREAL Delius: On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring Vaughan Williams: Piano Concerto Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 6 in B minor ‘Pathétique’ Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal Louis Lortie piano Sir Andrew Davis conductor

148 DSJ 160

Thursday 20th April and Friday 21st April 2017 at 8.00pm; Saturday 22nd April 2017 at 11.00am SEVERANCE HALL, CLEVELAND, OHIO Delius: Brigg Fair Vaughan Williams: Oboe Concerto in A minor Richard Strauss: Don Quixote Op.35 Frank Rosenwein oboe Mark Kosower cello Cleveland Orchestra Sir Andrew Davis conductor

Sunday 23rd April 2017 at 3.00pm GERMAN SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 611 SPRING GARDEN STREET, PHILADELPHIA PA 19123 Delius: Suite for Violin & Orchestra (arranged for violin and piano) Finzi: Romance (arranged for string quartet) Bax: Piano Quintet in G minor Nancy Bean violin Marcantonio Barone piano The Wister Quartet

Saturday 13th May 2017 at 7:30pm Summer Night Sibelius: Rakastava Mozart: Piano Concerto No 20 K466 Beethoven: Romance in F Grieg: Dance of the Trolls Delius: Summer Night on the River Vaughan Williams: Folk Song Suite Lara Melda piano (winner, BBC Young Musician 2010) Northern Chamber Orchestra Concert supported by The Delius Trust

DSJ 160 149

Friday 26th May and Saturday 27th May 2017 at 7.30pm Sunday 28th May 2017 at 3.00pm ROY THOMSON HALL, TORONTO Delius: On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor Griffes: Poem for flute and orchestra Beethoven: Symphony No 7 in A major Jean-Efflam Bavouzet piano Nora Shulman flute Toronto Symphony Orchestra Sir Andrew Davis conductor

Sunday 19th November 2017 at 6.30pm King’s Place, Hall One, London Scott: Pastoral and Reel for solo cello Delius: Cello Sonata (1916) Fauré: Cello Sonata No 1 in D minor Op 109 (1917) Webern: Cello Sonata Op posth (1914) Nadia Boulanger: Three Pieces for cello and piano (1914) Bridge: Cello Sonata in D minor H125 (1913–17) French and English wartime poetry and composer letters Paul Watkins cello Huw Watkins piano

A full list of all concerts and events is always available on The Delius Society website: delius.org.uk.

Forthcoming copy deadlines:

Delius Society Newsletter: 1st December 2016 Delius Society Journal: 1st February 2017

150 DSJ 160